The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress
July 25, 2014
WASHINGTON — The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.
The CIA got hold of the legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy. It’s unclear how the agency obtained the material.
At the time, the CIA was embroiled in a furious behind-the-scenes battle with the Senate Intelligence Committee over the panel’s investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, including accusations that the CIA illegally monitored computers used in the five-year probe. The CIA has denied the charges.
The email controversy points to holes in the intelligence community’s whistleblower protection systems and raises fresh questions about the extent to which intelligence agencies can elude congressional oversight.
The email related to allegations that the agency’s inspector general, David Buckley, failed to properly investigate CIA retaliation against an agency official who cooperated in the committee’s probe, said the knowledgeable people, who asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/25/234484/after-cia-gets-secret-whistleblower.html#storylink=cpy
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They shone a spotlight under the rock and what scurried there is pretty hideous. Dan Hardway once served as a staff investigator and researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. I attended a conference to "Pass the Torch" on what we've learned since Nov. 22, 1963. Hardway's program was entitled "A View from the Trenches: The HSCA and the CIA." Hardway detailed how CIA worked to hinder Congress' investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.
A body formed by the House of Representatives in 1976, the HSCA was founded to investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In brief, the HSCA was to follow up on information that the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House -- and other Congressional investigations after Watergate -- uncovered, including the startling revelations that the CIA and the Mafia conspired to murder foreign leaders, starting in 1960 with Patrice Lumumba in Congo and later that year to include Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hardway's work included interviewing people and researching documents related to the Central Intelligence Agency, including their connections to Lee Harvey Oswald.
The record shows, Mr. Hardway said, that within 24 hours of the assassination of President Kennedy, an anti-Castro organization in Miami, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE, an acronym based on the Spanish phrase for Directorate of Revolutionary Students) began to issue information to the United States press that linked Lee Harvey Oswald to Fidel Castro. The information included an episode in New Orleans where Oswald was handing out pro-Castro literature to passers-by in his "role" as chapter head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. During the leafleting, DRE members confronted Oswald, pushing him around and calling him a communist dupe. The police were called and arrested Oswald, who was not belligerent and had not initiated the confrontation.
This episode in New Orleans was even more important to Hardway and the HSCA than he knew in 1977 when he first began to investigate it. The reason: George Joannides, the intelligence officer the CIA assigned to serve as liaison to the HSCA in the late 1970s, also was in charge of paying almost $450,000 a month (in today's dollars) to the DRE in 1963. This vital information was not made known to the HSCA, nor to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s.
Below are Mr. Hardway's words, including a partial transcription of his presentation at Duquesne, and some observations on why his testimony is vitally important for our future as a democracy.
…If (the “Oswald, the Pro-Castro Commie” story) was that coordinated, that quick, and as detailed, it would be reasonable to infer that it had been laid on in advance. I set out to identify the sources of these stories that came out immediately after the assassination with detailed information on Oswald and his pro-Castro activities. I started asking for the CIA files on all those sources. I got a lot of them before we lost access, but I did not get them all. That was one of the things I was really pressing on, when I got shut down.
In the same period, I also found a reference to a CIA debriefing of Johnny Roselli, after Drew Pearson published his piece about Castro turning the assassins sent to kill him around and sending them back to kill Kennedy. I asked for the records about the debriefing that was part of what I was looking into with Bill Harvey. That's how I came across that. I very clearly remember some of the details about this. The debriefing happened at a CIA safe house over a period of two weeks in 1967. Sheffield Edwards was one of the debriefers. He was brought out of retirement, I think in order to do that, I think I remember that he was brought out of retirement.
And that was when the CIA changed the procedures on us. They brought George Joannides out of retirement to be the new liaison for me and Ed (Edwin L. Lopez), primarily. He closed our office at Langley. The agency set up a safe room for us to use as committee offices. I no longer had direct contact with any CIA employees to request files. All further requests for documents and files had to be in writing and approved through official channels. Files (we requested) were not produced for weeks after being requested. My whole inquiry into areas outside and inside the scope of my portfolio ground to a halt. We soon thereafter lost unexpurgated access and perk…
Long and short on the Rosselli debriefing: I was told eventually -- I was given expurgated access to it. As a matter of fact, it was the first expurgated document I was handed. It happened out at the old meeting room that I had at the CIA. It was one of the few times that I am sure I met George Joannides. Ed remembers meeting him a lot. I don't remember meeting that many times, but I know I met him that time because when I walked in, it was just me, him, and Scott Breckenridge.
They handed me the file. It was about 2-inches, 2-and-a-half-inches thick. I sat down at the desk and they stood there, grinning, which struck me as unusual, and I thought maybe they don't trust me to look at the file without them present, because usually whoever delivered the file (in the past) would leave and let me work on them. And they were standing there, grinning in anticipation. And I opened it. And not only was the document expurgated, instead of taking the document and blacking out the lines on the copy, which is what they always did, they had retyped the whole document leaving white spaces where things were left out.
I blew up. I left. And, uh. They agreed, after the committee issued a subpoena, they agreed to let Gary Cornwall see it, unexpurgated. Gary went out there one day in the middle of trying to get the final report written, with 20 things on his agenda to get done. He stayed maybe two hours. He was out of the office about two hours. I know because I was waiting for him to get back, because I wanted to find out what he'd seen. And when he came back in he said, “It doesn't have anything to do with what you're working on for the final report. Forget it.” And that was the end of it.
That was the end of it until I went before the Assassination Records Review Board, which I was subpoenaed before to testify. And after they'd asked me about all the documents they wanted to ask me about, they asked me if there was anything else that they should ask me about that they had not asked me about. I told them about the debriefing of Johnny Roselli, about Sheffield Edwards' involvement, about Harvey, leaving the (inaudible) with the Harvey files. They (ARRB) said they would search for that, because it certainly sounded interesting and relevant and something that should be disclosed. They later had the kindness to get back to me, to tell me there was no record of any such file having ever existed or having ever been requested by the House Select Committee on Assassinations...
The George Joannides case shows the lengths to which the CIA went to stonewall the HSCA investigation. That's not just what Mr. Hardway said, it's what G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel and staff director of the HSCA said:
I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee...
SNIP...
I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
That the Agency would put a “material witness” in as a “filter” between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.
The committee’s researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckinridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people.
They were certainly right about one question: the committee’s researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency’s integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.
SNIP...
Significantly, the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
CONTINUED...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/biographies/oswald/interview-g-robert-blakey/#addendum
Federal Judge John Tunheim, who headed the ARRB panel, the government body charged with finding, reviewing and releasing all pertinent JFK and MLK assassination records, said he was very surprised to learn to what extend the CIA went to obstruct HSCA Congressional investigators, the ARRB and the law:
“It really was an example of treachery,” Tunheim said in a recent interview of the CIA’s handling of the Joannides affair. “If (the CIA) fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things.”
SOURCE: http://www.bostonglobe.com/2013/11/25/government-still-withholding-thousands-documents-jfk-assassination/PvBM2PCgW1H11vadQ4Wp4H/story.html
What other things? If this is a democracy, We the People should know and know soon, if not immediately. The JFK assassination records still held by CIA, the Pentagon and other government agencies are mandated by law to be released by 2017 -- unless the President in 2017 determines they should not be released. I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but that fact alone makes me want to vote for the Democrat, even if it's someone I -- Octafish -- don't support in the primary. The GOP wing of CIA, the ones who entered into league with the Mafia to kill, has demonstrated they can't be trusted to do the right thing, let alone what's Constitutional.
Thanks Octafish!
1975 and to a certain extent Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner in the late 70s (in the wake of the Church Committee findings). They predictably met great resistance.
One example was in the form of former Warren Commission member (John McCloy):
Rockefeller also established the highly secret, Project Alpha. The main objective was to persuade Carter to provide a safe haven for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (code-named "Eagle"
. McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger were referred to as the "Triumvirate". Rockefeller used money from Chase Manhattan Bank to pay employees of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who worked on the project. Some of this money was used to persuade academics to write articles defending the record of Pahlavi. For example, George Lenczowski, professor emeritus at the University of California, was paid $40,000 to write a book with the "intention to answer the shah's critics".
Kissinger telephoned Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Carter, on 7th April, 1979, and berated the president for his emphasis on human rights, which he considered to be "amateurish" and "naive". Brzezinski suggested he talked directly to Jimmy Carter. Kissinger called Carter and arranged for him to meet David Rockefeller, two days later. Gerald Ford also contacted Carter and urged him to "stand by our friends".
McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger arranged for conservative journalists to mount an attack on Carter over this issue. On 19th April, George F. Will wrote about Carter and the Shah and said; "It is sad that an Administration that knows so much about morality has so little dignity."
On 19th April, Rosalynn Carter wrote in her diary: "We can't get away from Iran. Many people - Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Howard Baker, John McCloy, Gerald Ford - all are after Jimmy to bring the shah to the United States, but Jimmy says it's been too long, and anti-American and anti-shah sentiments have escalated so that he doesn't want to. Jimmy said he explained to all of them that the Iranians might kidnap our Americans who are still there."
McCloy had meetings with President Carter in the White House on 16th May and 12th June where he outlined his reasons for providing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with sanctuary. Carter listened politely to his arguments but refused to change his mind.
During the summer of 1979 McCloy contacted Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, Walter Mondale and Dean Rusk about the Shah being allowed to live in the United States. McCloy told them that Carter's refusal to provide sanctuary to an old U.S. ally was "ungentlemanly" and dismissed the idea that lives in Iran might be jeopardized. Vance later recalled that: "John (McCloy) is a very prolific letter writer. The morning mail often contained something from him about the Shah".
In July 1979, Mondale and Brzezinski told Jimmy Carter that they had changed their minds and now supported asylum for the Shah. Carter replied: "F*** the Shah. I'm not going to welcome him here when he has other places to go where he'll be safe." He added that despite the fact that "Kissinger, Rockefeller and McCloy had been waging a constant campaign on the subject" he did not want the Shah "here playing tennis while Americans in Teheran were being kidnapped or even killed."
McCloy then tried another tactic in order to destabilize Carter's administration. In September, a story was leaked that the CIA had "discovered" a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. It was claimed that this violated the agreement reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. McCloy, who had negotiated the agreement with Adlai Stevenson and the Soviets in 1962, knew this was not true. The agreement said that only those Soviet troops associated with the missiles had to leave the island. There was never a complete ban on all Soviet troops in Cuba. Therefore the presence of Soviet combat troops in Cuba was not a violation of the 1962 agreement.
In October, 1979, David Rockefeller's assistant, Joseph V. Reed, called the State Department and claimed that the Shah had cancer and needed immediate treatment in a U.S. medical facility. Cyrus Vance now told Carter that the Shah should be allowed in as a matter of "common decency". Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, argued that if the Shah died outside the United States, Kissinger and his friends would say "that first you caused the Shah's downfall and now you've killed him." Carter replied: "What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?"
Faced with the now unanimous opposition of his closest advisers, the president reluctantly agreed to admit the Shah. He arrived at New York Hospital on 22nd October, 1979. Joseph V. Reed circulated a memo to McCloy and other members of Project Alpha: "Our mission impossible is completed. My applause is like thunder." Less than two weeks later, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took hostage 66 Americans. Thus beginning the Iranian Hostage Crisis...
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccloyJ.htm
Here's a fact curiously missing from American history and any mention of the Warren Commission: Two of its members were directly responsible for the rise of post-war fascism. Allen Dulles, as a top official of the OSS and CIA, incorporated NAZI war criminals into the CIA from its founding. John McCloy, as High Commissioner for Germany, allowed Klaus Barbie and who-knows-who-else to escape justice. Of course, both men were also barons of Wall Street and Beltway Insiders. We all can see what that means today.
Banana Republicans who've pretty much greased the way for today's global feudalism.
- WE KNOW.
Do people think they'd have stopped all by themselves???????
