Archive for the ‘peter carlson’ tag
A Few Documents Your Government Made Public #
There’s some fascinating stuff in Peter Carlson’s story about the non-governmental National Security Archive. Like this brief list of things they retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests:
A CIA guidebook called “A Study of Assassination,” which advised right-wing Latin Americans on the most effective ways to bludgeon, stab and shoot their enemies.
A National Security Agency study revealing that the agency “deliberately skewed” its account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.
A 2002 Pentagon PowerPoint briefing on plans for the upcoming invasion of Iraq — code name “Polo Step” — that assumed that only 5,000 American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of 2006.
Perhaps the most famous documents obtained by the archive were the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” which detailed the agency’s illegal wiretaps and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. The archive filed its FOIA request for the “Family Jewels” in 1992. Fifteen years later, in 2007, the CIA finally released them, and they made headlines around the world.
(via brijit)