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Reply to "The Legacy of the CIA’s Secret LSD Experiments on America"

The CIA, during that era, did all kinds of illegal things, which resulted in their being properly called to account in a Senate investigation led by Senator Frank Church.  Church was carrying out responsibilities of the Congress to exercise oversight over agency activities.  His committee's findings described mountains of abuse.

 

<<<By the early years of the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the unfolding Watergate scandal brought the era of minimal oversight to an abrupt halt. The US Congress was determined to rein in the Nixon administration and to ascertain the extent to which the nation's intelligence agencies had been involved in questionable, if not outright illegal, activities.

A series of troubling revelations started to appear in the press concerning intelligence activities. First came the revelations of Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population[1][2] and Sam Ervin's Senate investigations that resulted.[3] The dam broke on 22 December 1974, when The New York Times published a lengthy article bySeymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the Central Intelligence Agency over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.[4]

These revelations convinced many Senators and Representatives that the Congress itself had been too lax, trusting, and naive in carrying out its oversight responsibilities.>>>

 

LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

 

One consequence of the Church investigation was to clamp down on the CIA's forays into such illegal activities.  Right wing extremists are fond of castigating Church and his investigation, claiming that the ultimate result was damage to critical intelligence operations.  Seemingly forgotten in all of that is the proven fact that the CIA brought that investigation down on itself by grossly and illegally  extending its activities into areas where it had no business going.


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