Glenn Greenwald has just published a subtle article about a leaked CIA document and the increasingly aggressive war being waged on Wikileaks, the site that anonymously publishes leaked sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, and religious documents.

The first part of the article deals with the leaked document, entitled "CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission. Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough. (PDF)" (and also uploaded to the Internet Archive for the IAdeposit project). This hubristic document announces "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters" and describes PR strategies for shoring up public support for the continued war in Afghanistan.

But the more interesting and disturbing part of Greenwald's story concerns Wikileaks. Greenwald interviewed Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks' Editor. The interview shed light on Wikileaks' work in exposing the secret activities of governments and corporations and also how the US and other governments are targeting Wikileaks as an enemy of the state and trying to destroy the organization -- for more see last week's NY Times article "Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers" and Wikileaks own editorial on the subject.

...In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction. Greenwald also points out the proposed law in Iceland which would provide meaningful whistle blower protection to groups like Wikileaks.

As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe" have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and the U.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them.

...The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly acute now because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated. This is exemplified by the type of public opinion management campaign detailed by the above-referenced CIA Report, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed in 2008, and the ways in which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape public opinion.

I highly recommend reading Greenwald's article. It's eye-opening on so many levels.

The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters. Glenn Greenwald. Salon.com. March 27, 2010.

[HT @JeremyScahill!]

Noah Shactman's cool Danger Room blog (from Wired) posted recently about the CIA's declassified Lost Magic Manual that has just resurfaced. In 1953, the CIA hired professional magician John Mulholland to adapt his techniques of stealth and misdirection to the craft of espionage. According to the BBC News, "the guide was part of a larger CIA programme, called Project MKULTRA, aimed at countering the Soviet mind-control techniques of the Cold War era." The classified manuals were believed to have been destroyed in 1973, but Intelligence historian H. Keith Melton and retired CIA officer Robert Wallace discovered a copy in 2007 in the CIA Archives. The Boston Globe has a great visual summary of some of Mulholland’s best tricks. Get a copy from isbn.nu. A great addition to any library. In fact a bunch of them already have a copy!

At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.”

The last paragraph in Thomas Paine's 1795 essay entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government said this:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric holder released the confidential CIA Inspector General report entitled "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 - October 2003). The report is not for the faint of heart, but I hope libraries will add the document to their collections. As Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti said in today's NY Times (Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations):

The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy.

Many have written about the report (Michael Sherer, Publius, Dahlia Lithwick to name but a few) but folks should read Glenn Greenwald's post on the topic:

"What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report". Glenn Greenwald. Monday Aug. 24, 2009.

As a side note, I'd like to reiterate my twitter comment for those that didn't see it. PLEASE would all journalists include links and citations for supporting documents on ALL of their pieces?? The Web means that there's no excuse or need to save space. Don't make your readers have to search for supporting documents. It'll make them go away.

Steven Aftergood has a good post about the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST): CIA’s CREST Leaves Cavity in Public Domain, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, April 6, 2009. Among other things he points to the new article in Mother Jones:

• Inside the CIA's (Sort of) Secret Document Stash. by Bruce Falconer. Mother Jones. 3 Apr 2009.

The article notes that the CIA monitors users of the FOIA documents:

Next to the computer terminals is a sign warning that "the CIA will gather and store information about your visit automatically" (a message driven home by two overhead video cameras encased in tinted glass) and that "unauthorized attempts to modify any information stored on this system, to defeat or circumvent security measures, or to utilize this system for other than its intended purposes are prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution."

See also: CIA Records Search Tool (CREST).

Steven Aftergood reports (CIA Updates Digital Archive, Restricts Access, Secrecy News, March 26, 2009) on the release by the Central Intelligence Agency of a new tool that allows users to search on-line to discover the availability of declassified CIA documents. The tool is the CIA FOIA - 25-Year Program Archive Search.

But you cannot download the documents you discover. Steven notes that the CIA will not "put the entire CREST database online so that anyone, anywhere could download these declassified, often heavily censored records. Nor will CIA release an electronic copy of the CREST database so that others may post it."

The CIA justifies withholding the complete text because, "The Agency evidently believes that there are latent secrets concealed in the declassified record that could somehow be extracted by a clever analyst who reviewed them in electronic form."

See also: Pozen, David. The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act. SSRN eLibrary. 26 Mar 2009.

Steven also says:

In 1995, President Clinton ordered agencies that classify information to “establish a Governmentwide database of information that has been declassified” (Executive Order 12958, section 3.8). That never happened, and in 2003 President Bush deleted the requirement (Executive Order 13292, section 3.7). Restoring such a requirement, and fulfilling it, would be an appealing feature of a new executive order on classification.

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence has posted the full text of one of its guidebooks, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis originally published in 1999. you can get it on the CIA site, but I also took the liberty of downloading it and then uploading it to the Internet Archive's government documents collection. That link is stable and would be appropriate for adding to the 856 field of your bib record. Wouldn't it be really cool if all of those 4412 govt documents in the IA's collection had downloadable MARC records?

Intelligence analysts, in seeking to make sound judgments, are always under challenge from the complexities of the issues they address and from the demands made on them for timeliness and volume of production…

How many times have we encountered situations in which completely plausible premises, based on solid expertise, have been used to construct a logically valid forecast–with virtually unanimous agreement–that turned out to be dead wrong?

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, the National Archives announced the opening of 1.3 million pages of Cold War era Central Intelligence Agency records, dating from 1947 to 1977. The documents are being released as “a part of the National Declassification Initiative program announced by the Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in April 2006.”

I'm not sure how many of these are available as digital copies, but nevertheless, these records may help some of my student patrons with their papers on the "Red Scare" and the Cold War (every semester I have at least five students working on some aspect of this topic!).

As everyone knows, wikipedia has been in the news recently because several large corporations got caught scrubbing their wikipedia entries -- Wired is keeping track of the most shameful wikipedia spin jobs. Well now it's been shown that the CIA and FBI has gotten in on the act. Anyone got the time to use Wikiscanner to see what other government agencies are scrubbing their wiki images?

The National Security Archives at George Washington University is making the CIA "family jewels" documents available as PDFs. "The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.
The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into five smaller files for easier download."

• The CIA's Family Jewels. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, Posted - June 21, 2007, Updated - June 26, 2007, 1 p.m.

The documents are also available at the CIA website, but I have not been able to find them available except in a one-page-at-a-time image viewer application. There is a link on the CIA FOIA homepage, or you can find the same link by searching "family jewels" or the document number "0001451843."

For an example of press coverage of the documents, see CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds "Assassination Plots, Domestic Spying Cited", By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus Washington Post, June 27, 2007; Page A01.

From SFGate.com:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Thursday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. more...

NYT: "The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency's director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday."

• C.I.A. to Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds by Scott Shane, New York Times, June 22, 2007.

The National Security Archive separately obtained and posted a "six-page summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975."

• The CIA's Family Jewels, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, June 21, 2007.
  Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s "Skeletons" File, Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975, With White House Memcons on Damage Control

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.