A kick in the family jewels

The CIA "family jewels" documents are available on-line in full (except the redacted parts, natch). That webpage has its own top-ten list of most interesting plots:

1) Journalist surveillance - operation CELOTEX I-II

2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport

3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett "thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program" (Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba

7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko

8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists

9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent)

10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc.

Though of course, as Meteor Blades and Tom Tomorrow rightly point out, this is partially--hell, maybe even mainly--a ploy to say "That was then; we don't do that now." Heck, in the New York Times article I linked to above, CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced the release as "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency." But in the same article he discusses our use of extraordinary rendition--supposedly it's supposed to make us feel better that there haven't been 1245 people kidnapped and shipped to foreign countries where they're kept in secret facilities and tortured for information without ever being accused of a crime. There have only been "fewer than 100," he says.

But no, we're way different from 30 years ago.