Steel yourself, America.
In a document dump of both exhilarating and terrifying proportions, the CIA announced it will release its "family jewels" next week: close to 700 pages of documents chronicling secret Agency activity from the fifties to the seventies. (A preview of what's to come includes reports of detentions, wiretapping, surveillance, and other sordid current administration favorites.) "CIA Director Michael Hayden on Thursday called the documents being released next week unflattering, but he added that 'it is CIA's history.' 'The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency,' Hayden told a conference of historians." Hmm, we'll see.
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Isn't it just bizarre. On the same day we get news of Cheney's refusal to comply with laws overseeing his office, we get a story that the CIA is going to open up some of its files and let us know just how dank and dark it was in there.
What a contrast. What a world.
that's fascinating. Maybe there is some hope in the administration that this can be used for the argument: "hey it worked during the cold war, so guantanamo's not so bad" or something like that?
An exciting time to be a cold war historian...
I was thinking the same thing. The timing of this seems strange, as if someone decided that revealing a litany of bad behavior by the CIA over the Cold War decades might help exonerate the current administration of its shadiness. (I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but this type of CIA info kinda lends itself to them.) At any rate, nice to see it all released.