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CIA manual of trickery and deception resurfaces
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 [w: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.”Continue reading
CIA Inspector General report on abuse of prisoners
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.
More about CIA’s CREST system
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.
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). Continue reading
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.Continue reading
CIA’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis book now online
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!] Continue reading
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