CIA's "family jewels" declassified

Last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden announced that the agency would be releasing its "family jewels," a collection of particularly controversial files from the 1970's. Yesterday, the National Security Archive put the documents up on its website, along with some much-needed context, and even a "top-ten most interesting documents" list.

This seems like a smart move on Hayden's part - if we're ever going to win the war on terror, the intelligence agencies are going to have to convince my generation that their top priority is spying on the bad guys - not spying on our phone calls, emails, and MySpace pages. Admitting to the CIA's past mistakes is a step in the right direction (but of course, be careful what you say if you email back and forth with your friends about the documents).

"The CIA's Family Jewels" [National Security Archive]
PDF of Family Jewels report [National Security Archive]
"CIA Releases Files on Past Misdeeds" [Washington Post]

When did Bush learn about Abu Ghraib?

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the Bush administration has tried to paint the whole thing as the work of a few bad apples - despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval of many of the controversial interrogation methods at the heart of the scandal, including the use of forced nudity, blackout hoods, forced standing, and threats of German Shepherd attacks (designed to exploit what one memo called the "Arab fear of dogs").

Furthermore, although Rumsfeld never officially authorized it as an interrogation method in the way he did the aforementioned techniques, there is strong evidence that the photographs of forced homosexual activity at Abu Ghraib were part of a plan to blackmail deeply religious Muslim prisoners through sexual humiliation (see the post "Conservatives for gay sexual abuse").

Now, Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who helped break the scandal, has a new piece on when Bush learned of the situation, and what he did (and/or didn't do) about it. The Washington Post article provides a good overview of the longer New Yorker article.

"New Questions about Abu Ghraib" [Washington Post]
"The General's Report" [The New Yorker]