The cry for expanded CIA assassination powers is being supported by a lot of inaccurate references to the 1975 Church Committee investigation. “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” as their final report was called, was the most in-depth investigation into the American intelligence establishment ever made.

Reporters are claiming that the Church Committee tied the hands of the CIA, and now it’s time to restore their power to use whatever ruthless and inhumane means may be necessary to implement our foreign policies. In fact, although the Church Committee exposed a closet full of nightmarish operations carried out against American citizens, and some of the CIA’s activities in Chile, it was by no means an accounting of CIA atrocities around the world, and had no legal implications whatsoever. Its function was simply to inform the public of the widespread abuses that were being committed in their midst.

Among other things, the Church Committee revealed that:

• a CIA program to open mail to or from selected American citizens generated 1.5 million names stored in the Agency’s computer bank.
• intelligence units within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created files on over one million Americans.
• the FBI carried out five hundred thousand investigations of so-called subversives from 1960 to 1974, without a single court conviction.
• computers in the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored every cable sent overseas, or received, by Americans from 1947 to 1975.
• Army intelligence units conducted investigations against one hundred thousand American citizens during the Vietnam War era.
• the CIA engaged in drug experiments (the MK/ULTRA Project) against unsuspecting subjects (two of whom died from side effects).
• at least two foreign leaders were the direct targets of CIA assassination plots (none successful).
• letters written anonymously by FBI agents were designed to incite violence among blacks.
• the FBI COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) targeted civil rights activists and Vietnam War dissidents.
• the FBI attempted to blackmail civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and encouraged him to commit suicide.
• the CIA manipulated elections in democratic regimes (Chile was but one of several).
• the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allowed tax information to be misused by intelligence agencies for political purposes.
• intelligence agencies carried out burglaries in the homes and offices of suspected “subversives”.
• the CIA infiltrated religious, media, and academic organizations.

(Source: America’s Secret War: The CIA in a Democratic Society, by Loch K. Johnson, Oxford University Press,1989)

Among the worst CIA paramilitary operations was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. According to former CIA Director William Colby, some 20,000 members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) were murdered. “Infrastructure” referred to civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers.

An accounting of lethal CIA operations overseas lies far beyond the scope of this email, or of the Church Committee, for that matter. Indonesia, Guatemala, etc, etc. I’m not going to try to make a list. It seems like it should be easy to demonstrate what kind of horrors we can expect if we give the CIA a mandate to assassinate foreign “terrorists” since there are so many examples in history to choose from.

Originally intended to be the “eyes and ears” of goverment, the CIA has often been used as a third world hit squad, and some are calling for this again. But the “unconventional” model for counter- insurgency war that targets civilians, developed in the late 20th century and typified by the Phoenix Program, has been remarkably unsuccessful in Latin America and elsewhere. In Vietnam, the death squads only inspired villagers to fight for their lives, in some cases down to the last man, woman and child.

Paul

http://slate.msn.com/pol/01-09-18/pol.asp

Did We Handcuff the CIA?

The national security hawks say yes. The CIA says no.

By David Corn

Posted Tuesday, Sept.18, 2001

Before the remains of the World Trade Center had even cooled, national security hawks took to the airwaves to blame CIA reforms for the failure of the intelligence community to detect and prevent the attack.

“We were basically spying with one arm tied behind our back,” said R. James Woolsey, CIA chief in the early 1990s, on CNN’s Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer, citing 1995 CIA guidelines that regulate the recruitment of sources who have a history of criminal activity and human-rights violations. “These restrictive limitations on not being able to recruit people who have some violence in their past as spies were ridiculous.”

On Crossfire, Woolsey claimed these regulations “make it difficult to penetrate terrorists. . . . It’s like telling the FBI to penetrate the Mafia without putting any criminals on its payrolls.”

Ambassador Paul Bremer, who chaired a national commission on terrorism, chimed in, telling CNN that the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated CIA misdeeds in the 1970s, did “a lot of damage to our intelligence services. . . . And the more recent problem was that the previous administration put into effect guidelines which restricted the ability of CIA agents to go after. . . terrorist spies.” President George Bush the First, a past CIA chief, and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, blasted the regulations and demanded that the country “take the wraps off” the spies.

The Senate took steps to do just that last Thursday by passing “The Combating Terrorism Act of 2001,” part of which instructs the CIA to rescind the 1995 guidelines. But despite all the vamping, removing the guidelines won’t help the United States wage its new war on terrorism.

And there’s no indication the CIA even wants the rules lifted.

The 1995 guidelines were written after the press revealed that a thuggish Guatemalan military official, who had been involved in the murder of an American hotelier and the torture and murder of a rebel leader married to an American, was on the CIA payroll. (By the way, the agency had withheld information from Congress about its relationship with this killer. ) The guidelines have never been made public, but CIA officials have described them to Hill staffers and intelligence-watchers. The rules compel CIA case officers to notify headquarters when they recruit a violent brute as a source, and they require the recruitment be reviewed at a senior level. But they don’t prohibit the CIA from working with terrorists to discover what terrorists are doing. CIA case officers are free to seek and pay informants within terrorist outfits. They merely have to alert supervisors back home and receive a go-ahead.

“The fuss about these guidelines is totally a bunch of hooey,” says one government employee familiar with the rules (who cannot be identified any further). “They do not forbid anything.”

In June 2000, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow denied that the guidelines unduly restricted the agency: “The notion that our human rights guidelines are an impediment to fighting terrorism is simply wrong. No one knows better than we do that when combating terrorism it is often necessary to deal with unsavory individuals. But we do so with eyes wide open and appropriate notification to senior officials.”

Harlow noted that the CIA has “never, ever turned down a request to use someone, even someone with a record of human rights abuses, if we thought that person could be valuable in our overall counter- terrorism program.” Last year, the CIA did not back an effort in Congress to kill these rules, which can be rescinded by the CIA director or the president without the passage of legislation.

While the hawks argue the guidelines discourage risk-taking in the field, the rules may well enhance derring-do. A case officer who recruits a terrorist as a source under the guidelines is protected from a reprimand from above if the terrorist takes part in, say, a bombing plot.

Penetrations of tightly knit secret organizations, a task that the agency has never done well, won’t be improved by erasing the guidelines. Those who blame the current crisis on intelligence reformers deceive the public by falsely raising expectations - just get rid of these pesky rules, and the CIA will be inside Osama Bin Laden’s tent. And, more importantly, all their huffing distracts the nation from the actual intelligence failures that preceded Sept.11.

David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is author of the political novel Deep Background. You can e-mail him at dacor@aol.com

Human Rights Watch hrwatchnyc@igc.org

U. S. Policy on Assassinations, CIA

Letter to Bush Urges Restraint

(New York, September 20, 2001) The U. S. government should not relax its current policies on assassinating foreign enemies and recruiting CIA sources with records of serious human rights abuse, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to U. S. President George Bush today.

If the United States were to be engaged in an armed conflict in Afghanistan or elsewhere, international humanitarian law does not prevent military forces from targeting opposing troops, including their commanders, Human Rights Watch said.

However, Human Rights Watch said that in countries where law enforcement cooperation is possible, the United States should remain committed to a criminal justice approach – investigation, arrest, trial and punishment, with all the guarantees of a fair trial that are central to any system of respect for human rights – rather than executions or targeting noncombatants. Just as the “war” on drugs or the mafia does not obviate basic criminal justice guarantees, so the war on the organization responsible for the September 11 attacks should not bypass the human-rights protection against assassination.

Human Rights Watch urged that the CIA should continue to discourage relationships with abusive informants whenever it is possible that the informant will understand the relationship to suggest tacit approval of abusive conduct – an issue of particular concern if abusive governments are enlisted in efforts to curb terrorism. The CIA guidelines clearly had nothing to do with the intelligence failure before the September 11 attacks, the letter added.

“In any time of national crisis, there is a temptation to embrace any proposal that appears to ‘do something’ about the real dangers people face,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But changing these policies would threaten the very values that came under attack that day. Those are the basic democratic values we should now be redoubling our efforts to defend.”

Central Intelligence Agency guidelines adopted in 1995 do not prohibit the Agency from recruiting sources or informants who are involved in human rights abuse, Human Rights Watch noted. They simply require headquarters approval before field agents can proceed with such recruitment.

A copy of the letter to President Bush can be found at http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/09/bushlet0920.htm

For more information on the September 11 attacks, please see the Human Rights Watch website at http://www.hrw.org/

Here’s an interesting exerpt from James Bamford’s new book, Body of Secrets. I’m not saying I think the WTC and Pentagon attacks were anything similar - but note that all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed Operation Northwoods. - Paul

Lemnitzer had no respect for the civilians he reported to. He believed they interfered with the proper role of the military. The “civilian hierarchy was crippled not only by inexperience,” he would later say, “but also by arrogance arising from failure to recognize its own limitations. . . . The problem was simply that the civilians would not accept military judgements.” In (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman L. ) Lemnitzer’s view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over.

For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. “The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike,” said one report at the time. “President Kennedy was pilloried by the superpatriots as a ‘no-win’ chief. . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . . Active- duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere.”

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U. S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D. C. , Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijecked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the secret U-2 scandal fresh in the public’s memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade

Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy’s inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States “could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable.” What he was suggesting was a pretext - a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage - carried out secretly against the united States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer. But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy’s failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26,1962. Concerned that General Lansdale’s various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly “go soft” on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property. Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. “World opinion, and the United Nations forum,” said a secret JCS document, “should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”

“We could blow up a U. S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” they proposed; “casualty lists in U. S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

There seemed to be no limit to their fanaticism: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” they wrote. “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. . . . We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida. . . etc.”