The uncovering of the CIA's "family jewels" - a catalog of the Agency's crimes committed at home and abroad in the 1970s - underscores my principal objection to the trite post-9/11 conventional wisdom, "Everything's changed." Because, of course, nothing has changed, not really, at least not where the unmitigated evil of the U.S. government is concerned. What these nearly 700 pages of previously classified materials reveal is that all the supposedly innovative techniques of torture, domestic surveillance, and utter disregard for the rights of U.S. citizens supposedly spawned by the "war on terrorism" predated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Detention-without-trial, "waterboarding," and other illegal abuse endured by suspects now being held at our Guantanamo gulag were prefigured, according to the documents, by the case of Yuri Nosenko, who was held for three and a half years after defecting in 1963. In spite of having handed over information that led to the uncovering of hidden microphones in the U.S. embassy in Moscow and exposing at least one West European top official as a KGB tool, Nosenko was not believed by James Jesus Angleton, the Agency's half-loony counterintelligence chief, who was convinced he was a KGB plant. Nosenko was kept in solitary confinement at a CIA facility and relentlessly tortured. Strapped to a polygraph machine for seven hours at a time, he stoutly maintained his innocence, and the Agency openly discussed ways to dispose of him without raising undue notice. He was finally believed, taken out of the crazed Angleton's custody, and given a CIA sinecure, while the entire affair was hushed up. What's different today is merely a question of scale: yet the general outlines of the neocon program of warmongering, waterboarding, and the waylaying of innocents took shape long ago. The Bush administration has merely refined and perfected the details. And that's the main difference: yesterday our rulers had the decency to keep their immoral means and methods a secret, which meant they knew they had not only broken the law, but had done something profoundly wrong. Today, they invent elaborate legal and political theories designed to justify and even valorize their police-state methods. http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11216 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
