Sunday, December 09, 2007

The Santayana moment of the CIA and Congress

"WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department and the CIA's internal watchdog announced Saturday a joint inquiry into the spy agency's destruction of videotaped interrogations of two suspected terrorists as the latest scandal to rock U.S. intelligence gathered steam. "-Washington Post
It is with some amusement to see Washington all in a tizzy about the destruction of the waterboarding videos of the Central Intelligence agency. It seems everybody has forgotten the deeds of CIA employees Sidney Gottlieb and former CIA director Richard Helms who back in the seventies destroyed most of the documents of CIA brainwashing experiments of the MKULTRA, Bluebird and Artichoke programs. Helms even got the National Security Medal. Nothing ever really became of the destruction of these records. As the Grassley axiom states: "If you reward illegality you get more of it!" or perhaps in this latest case of CIA destroying records the outrage being expressed may be short lived as George Santayana said over one hundred years ago:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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