First they came for ConsortiumNews, and I did not speak out—

[Octafish]

460. *You* have made the years fly by, Rex.

You!

The CIA's History Problem is Our History Problem

David Wallace
Huffington Post, 06/16/2006 Udated: 05/25/2011

EXCERPT...

Such is the case with recent news accounts in the Washington Post and the New York Times that in the late 1950s the CIA knew that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina and had a pretty close pseudonym for him (Clemens instead of the actual alias of Klement), but did nothing to bring him to justice. That the CIA sought the cooperation and protection of Nazis, even those guilty of war crimes, after World War Two to serve its Cold War struggles is not news. But the extent of these relationships and the depths the CIA went through to protect them is news. These disclosures have been made possible through the ongoing efforts of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), launched over eight years ago by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The key that unlocked this unsavory history has been the unparalleled access granted to the IWG into formerly secret government records and archives.

Concern over these disclosures extend beyond the sad facts surfaced by the IWG: such as official protection of Nazis residing in the United States and the CIA's post-war use of top Eichmann aides. They also include the entirely unconscionable fact that it has taken generations for the CIA to disclose this information, and only did so after a special act of Congress supplemented by years long battles to protect them from public knowledge. IWG member Thomas H. Baer pointed to such battles when he thanked the CIA for finally coming clean this past week. However, coming clean occurred only after "reversal of [a six year] policy of thinly veiled noncompliance" with the IWG's legal mandate and the ongoing efforts of members of Congress and (some) IWG members and staff in making an "ironclad case decrying CIAs misinterpretation of its [legal] obligations."

Why has the CIA taken so long to open such records and archives? And do the excuses proffered around protecting national security really hold any credible value? I think the answer to the second question must be no, of course not. As to the first question, that is a trickier one, but one must look beyond the legal loopholes that protect secret information for such inordinate periods and look to see what agendas are at play. Clearly one agenda is to provide a simplistic and comforting (and at times woefully inaccurate) past as a means of enabling an ignorant, but strongly held, patriotism as a form of social glue that (kind of) holds society together. But a simplistic and comforting and inaccurate past can only be realized through the unreasonable, though legal, controls granted to the CIA over its historical records and archives. And it is in these seemingly rationally derived controls that the past itself can be held hostage.

Archives and records are more than just what they would appear to be at face value. They are more than just static documentary objects that record "what happened." In fact, they themselves are desired objects of manipulation and control that go to the heart of what society believes and comes to believe. They often lie at the center of what narratives can be constructed, or not constructed, as a means for making sense or nonsense of our world.

CONTINUED w/links to the fine print...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wallace/the-cias-history-problem-_b_23206.html

That's the kind of stuff no one apart from seven or eight people on DU and the 40 or 50 hits on HP will muster. But when it comes to Democracy, they matter infinitely more than the millions hynotized by the tee vee.