Tuesday, October 14, 2008
It's no big secret that the Central Intelligence Agency breaks the law. But just how often its does in is a shocker. A Congressional report reveals that the CIA's spooks "engage in highly illegal activities" at least 100,000 times each year (which breaks down to hundreds of crimes every day). Mind you, we aren't talking about run-of-the-mill illegal activities — these are "highly illegal activities" that "break extremely serious laws."
In 1996, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a huge report entitled "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century." Buried amid hun-dreds of pages is a single, devastating paragraph:
The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated efforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself.
Amazingly, there is no explanation, no follow-up. The report simply drops this bombshell and moves on as blithely as if it had just printed a grocery list.
One of the world's foremost experts on the CIA — John Kelly, who uncovered this revelation — notes that this is "the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes."
He goes on to say:
The report suggested that the CIA's crimes include murder and that "the targets of the CS [Clandestine Service] are increasingly international and transnational and a global presence is increasingly crucial to attack those targets." In other words, we are not talking about simply stealing secrets. We are talking about the CIA committing crimes against humanity with de facto impunity and con-gressional sanctioning.
Other government documents, including CIA reports, show that the CIA's crimes include terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. The documents also show that these crimes are part and parcel of deliberate CIA policy (the [congressional] report notes that CIA personnel are "directed" to commit crimes).
