© AFP Photo / Adalberto / RoquueTourists visit the Playa Giron Museum, dedicated to the Bay of Pigs combats 50 years ago, at the Bay of Pigs, in the Matanzas province, Cuba, on April 17, 2011.
Over 50 years after the Bay of Pigs invasion went awry, the US federal government is still attempting to keep secrets about the failed overthrow of the Cuban government, with an Obama administration lawyer arguing this week to keep a document classified.
The National Security Archive, a private research institution, has sought to force the government to hand over the fifth of a five-volume internal account of the Bay of Pigs. The four earlier volumes were released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Penned by a CIA staff historian in the years between 1973 and 1984, the final document chronicles - and presumably critiques - the CIA's own investigation of how the invasion went wrong.
In 1961, not long after the Cuban revolution had ousted Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, a US ally, American lawmakers were growing nervous about the new Fidel Castro-led government. In a plan organized under President Eisenhower and authorized by President Kennedy, the CIA trained Cuban exiles to act as a paramilitary force that would usurp Cuban troops at the Bay of Pigs in a surprise attack.
The plot fell apart for a variety of reasons, with many of the 1,500 CIA-trained Cubans killed before they could rush past the beach. The Castro government, strengthened in its resolve after the victory, solidified its socialist stance.
Yet the CIA's interpretation of the events remains shrouded in secrecy. Assistant US Attorney Mitchell P. Zeff told the US Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, the second highest court in the nation, that "the passage of time has not made it releasable."
Comment: The author may benefit from learning about psychopaths and ponerology. "One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic way. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people. The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and at the same time a criterion for recognizing the association in concert as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis."