Reuters June 27, 2007
ANALYSIS-Can CIA abuses from past be repeated today?
By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON, June 27 (Reuters) - Can some of the CIA abuses from the 1960s and 1970s be repeated today?
The CIA says no, but some veteran CIA watchers disagree, saying the U.S. policies of warrantless eavesdropping and secret prisons for terrorism suspects seem similar in some ways to past practices.
The CIA declared on Tuesday in declassifying 700 papers detailing past illegal assassination plots and wiretapping of Americans that these activities were from a "very different era and a very different agency" and that oversight laws that emerged from that period have made a big difference.
"I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," said CIA Director Michael Hayden. "What we do now to protect Americans we do within a powerful framework of law and review."
Experts, however, see comparisons to the bad old days of the CIA and activities the CIA has carried out under President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
Some of these include CIA-run secret prisons abroad for holding terrorism suspects indefinitely, harsh interrogation methods for trying to extract information from these suspects and a warrantless eavesdropping program that privacy advocates call a domestic spying program.
The dirty laundry from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the three-year incarceration and interrogation of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, was set against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Today's activities are aimed against the rise in Islamic militancy, which Bush has likened to a lengthy war with global implications.
Arthur Hulnick, a Boston University professor and author who was a 30-year CIA veteran, said the CIA's past holds clues to the present.
"What we learned is that all of this was directed by the White House or in some way by policy officials," he said. "The only thing you can say was CIA officials may have been a little more enthusiastic about these things that they should have been."
He said he would like to know more about the CIA program under which terrorism suspects were transferred to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, and the interrogation methods used, and more detail about alleged plots broken up as a result of information gained from these activities.
CAREFUL REVIEW
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the CIA has conducted the programs appropriately and that they were an important tool in fighting the war on terrorism.
"It has been carefully reviewed and it has been effective in preventing terrorist attacks from taking place and saving innocent lives," Mansfield said.
Other experts see similarities between the wiretapping of American anti-war groups in the 1960s and 1970s and the National Security Agency current warrantless eavesdropping, which civil liberties groups call domestic spying.
The Bush administration says the program is justified and only used to track communications between terrorism suspects abroad and their contacts within the United States, but some analysts are concerned the program goes far beyond that.
"The spying on Americans in the 1970s was retail, that was gumshoe stuff. The NSA activities -- they're spying on everyone," said John Pike, an intelligence expert at GlobalSecurity.org.
He said Americans are more willing to go along with such activities in the belief that they are preventing another Sept. 11-style attack.
Some CIA watchers would like the agency to be more forthcoming with information it is said to have been withholding about the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert and UCLA professor, said she would like to see declassified the CIA inspector general's report on what went wrong with intelligence before Sept. 11.
"I for one don't think it's a coincidence that these 700 pages of ancient history were released at the same time the CIA is still taking serious heat for not releasing that document to Capitol Hill," she said.
© Copyright 2007, Reuters
