CIA violated ...

There's a newish report out by PHR (Physicians for Human Rights), documenting the various roles played by medical personnel in the CIA torture programs during the Bush years. Many of these so-called medical professionals appear to have a rather unseemly hankering for understanding the effects of torture on the human subject. Fascinating, to be sure, but that "do no harm" thing also seems a quaint anachronism in our doped up and fiendish times.

Now, the CIA part:

said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."

Which, with the addition of the words 'has continually,' is pretty much a summary of the CIA, which has repeatedly demonstrated an insistent vector toward human experimentation with drugs and torture, all in violation of "accepted legal and ethical standards" since inception. In 1953, the CIA, in combine with the DoD, sprayed LSD on a small town in France. They or their proxies have jacked up unwitting subjects with all manner of dope and ghoulish enterprise, but especially, the CIA liked LSD. Still do. Today, in the 21st century, the CIA are still whacking up subjects, now "detainees," with who knows what cocktails of drugs and ghoulish enterprise. Well, we have some idea.

Of course, the CIA doesn't have dink-weed operations out there yowling about violations of accepted legal and ethical standards by the CIA. Oh, no. They have Congress for that. And congress do about as much as PHR will manage to do with this report.

CIA in the House! Abarelli talks

Ok, the CIA are not actually in the house. Just the letters, so far as we know, make it in, as Abarelli talks about, what else? The CIA.

CIA calls it way back

More missing the boat, smelling the coffee, hammering own thumb.

Declassified CIA documents on South Korea show that the spy agency was surprised by the 1979 assassination of its dictatorial president by his intelligence chief, did not anticipate the military coup d'etat that ensued, and dismissed the strength of growing unrest that eventually erupted in near-civil war.

Following the coup, in May 1980, protest and civil unrest in the southern city of Kwangju plunged the country into near anarchy. President Jimmy Carter, upon the advice of the U.S. State Department and the CIA, and fearing North Korea might take advantage of the instability, authorized U.S.-led South Korean troops to put down the Kwangju “uprising,” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protesters.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Tim Shorrock, a Washington-based journalist and longtime human rights activist, who published them Tuesday on the Web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

Shorrock reports that “months before” the uprising, “in an analysis entitled ‘The Outlook for President Pak [Chung Hee] and South Korea's Dissidents,’ the CIA dismissed the worker and student resistance, as well as the political opposition, as unorganized and ineffectual and unable to muster public sympathy for its demands for greater democracy and worker rights.”

CIA Black Arts

The Black Art of "Master Illusions"

How do wars begin? With a "master illusion," according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda," known today as "news management." In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression." This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons - the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

More ... not necessarily CIA stuff. Or maybe it is. Ahh, who the fuck knows? For all I know, John freakin' Pilger could be a CIA asset, in some weird logistical experimental, Operation Artichoke kind of way.