© counterpunch.org
The CIA has published online nearly 13 million pages of declassified records, including papers on the US role in overthrowing foreign governments and the secret 'Star Gate' telepathy project.
The range of documents, known as
the CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) database, covers an array of materials related to the Vietnam War, Korean War and Cold War. One example is data on the Berlin tunnel project (code-named Operation Gold), which was a joint CIA and British intelligence scheme to carry out surveillance on the Soviet Army HQ in Berlin during the 1950s.
In all, more than 12 million documents are accessible, covering the history of the CIA from its creation in the 1940s up to the 1990s - with intelligence officials giving assurances that the half-century of data is in its entirety, with nothing removed.
"None of this is cherry-picked," CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak told CNN. "It's the full history. It's good and bads."
For instance, details are provided on the CIA's participation in the 1973 coup in Chile which saw the rise of the Pinochet regime, as well as on the infamous MK-Ultra project, dubbed the CIA mind control program, which involved experiments - some of them illegal - on human subjects, to develop drugs and procedures for interrogation and torture.
Comment: Interesting timing. It seems like the CIA is trying to do damage control against their failing information war against Trump and Russia.
Here is a
sampling of the documents:
The online records, shed light on the agency's activities throughout the Vietnam, Korean and Cold War conflicts; they also includes documents relating to UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate program, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. The archives also cover events from the 1940s the 1990s (each year, a new batch are declassified) and include details about the
flight of war criminals from Nazi Germany, the
quarter-mile Berlin tunnel built to tap Soviet telephone lines, internal intelligence bulletins and memos from former CIA directors,
UFO reports and more.
The released trove also includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.
Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer.
Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner" the
BBC reported.
One set of documents details results of psychic tests on Uri Geller, where he attempted to copy drawings made by researchers from within a sealed room.
One of the tests involved drawings. A word was selected at random from a dictionary. The first word selected was "fuse". A firecracker was then drawn by someone outside the locked room. The picture was then taped to the wall outside Geller's cell and he was told via intercom the drawing was finished. The CIA documents say: "His almost immediate response was that he saw a 'cylinder with noise coming out of it'. "His drawing to correspond with it was a drum, along with a number of cylindrical-looking objects."
The second word chosen was "bunch" and a scientist drew a bunch of grapes. The document states: "Geller's immediate response was that he saw 'drops of water coming out of the picture'. "He then talked about 'purple circles'. "Finally, he said that he was quite sure that he had the picture. His drawing was indeed a bunch of grapes."
The researchers concluded Uri "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner".
Other unusual records include a collection of reports on flying saucers, and the recipes for invisible ink.
"None of this is cherry-picked," said CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak,
cited by CNN. "It's the full history. It's good and bads."
Nothing in the archive is newly declassified. Although the documents are declassified, redactions do exist throughout the millions of pages. The redactions, which Horniak describes as light, were done to protect sources and methods that could potentially harm national security, she explained.
The archive is massive, and new developments on the CIA's activities throughout its storied history are likely to come out as the millions of pages are reviewed.
So is the online database likely to reveal anything particularly juicy? It is not likely, especially since the documents have likely been extensively scrubbed in advance even though CIA Director of Information Management Joseph Lambert said the agency did one last check through the collection before releasing it, and did not reclassify any more documents.
However, the documents will surely provide hours of inquiry for historians, war buffs, UFO enthusiasts and others. The archives cover events from the 1940s the 1990s. It can be
accessed as the following link.
Comment: Facing reality: Obama's presidency was a failure
The Legacy of Obama: Spreading Imperial Death and Destruction Around The Globe