C.I.A. to Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds

"Misdeeds"? More like fighting for your freedoms, mister!

The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday.

But if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't mind a little domestic spying.

But here's the fun tidbit, because it shows for the one thousandth time that "wise old man" Kissinger is an asshole, and - well, read on:

In one of the conversations, Henry A. Kissinger, then serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser, denounced the efforts of William E. Colby, director of central intelligence, to push an aggressive investigation of the agency’s past transgressions.

Mr. Kissinger said the accusations then appearing daily about agency misconduct were “worse than in the days of McCarthy,” and expressed concern that they would intimidate C.I.A. officers, so that “you’ll end up with an agency that does only reporting and not operations.”

“What Colby has done is a disgrace,” Mr. Kissinger said, according to the transcript, posted along with the others by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (nsarchive.org).

“Should we suspend him?” Mr. Ford asked.

“No,” Mr. Kissinger replied, “but after the investigation is over you could move him and put in someone of towering integrity.”

A year later, Mr. Ford replaced Mr. Colby as director with George Bush.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Bloody, tragic, maddening history.