7 ms·

I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have bee

I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not.

peacethroughx 9y ago
Then why has the CIA fought so hard to redact these documents, including in 2017 almost telling the president he can't release these docs despite wanting to. Fact: the docs are being held illegally due to the CIA's pressure (threats?) on the President. The law said 25 years and all the docs have not been released. Many are still redacted. It's downright scary that the current CIA is still defending its past crimes. Soon it will be an accepted fact that the CIA committed a coup in America, and everyone will act like they knew it all along and it's boring. People are sheep and the CIA is the shepherd.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  A coup to do…what? What was the motive behind it? What evidence is there to back this up?
  - peacethroughx 9y ago
    The movie JFK is basically a documentary (with many wrong details) and is the reason for the law that lead to these files being released. You know how people say it would be impossible to cover up something so big? It would have to leak? Well, it did. The CIA/Mafia/Cuban assassination connection is firmly established fact now. Among many other important facts use to be "conspiracy theories." Motivations tl;dr https://i.imgur.com/WEjm2ig.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WEjm2ig.jpg
    - Tade0 9y ago
      > and befriending our enemies( Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland ) Odd choice of countries.
      - cat199 9y ago
        in the cold war? not really..
      - nl 9y ago
        Yugoslavia, Poland They were in the news around then because of possible attempts they were making to break away from Soviet control. Yugoslavia had already broken with the Soviets and in 1961 setup the non-aligned movement[1]. In 1956 the Poles had refused to vote against the UN resolution condemning Soviet intervention (invasion) of Hungary and there was some hope that these splits could have been exploited. This isn't entirely impossible. In 1970 Poland and West Germany signed a treaty, which to some degree had been brought about by the Catholic church (which had been suppressed by the Polish goverment in the early '60's). Counter-factuals are hard, but Catholic JFK may have been able to change things earlier, there. Of course some couldn't see any distinction between the Poles and the Russians ("all commies") and so you get posters like this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia#The_1948_Yugoslavia-Soviet_split https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia#The_1948_Yugoslavia...
    - ablation 9y ago
      > The movie JFK is basically a documentary Goodness me, no. Have you read the sources Oliver Stone borrowed from when cooking it up? To say they are fantasies would be giving a disservice to the word.
  - dleslie 9y ago
    Money. CIA drug smuggling was/is a huge cash cow. Kennedy was planning to "shatter [the agency] to a thousand pieces" and so had to die.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Quite a worldview you have there. Is there any actual evidence of a CIA coup in the US?
  - nl 9y ago
    Is there any actual evidence of a CIA coup in the US? Of course there isn't. But as the OP says, the lack of evidence doesn't mean it won't soon be accepted that it happened (although I suspect this wasn't what they were trying to say). The "9/11 was a US government conspiracy" (and various versions of that) makes it clear how easy it is to sell conspiracy theories, and that was only 16 years ago.
    - GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
      What would you consider as 'actual evidence'? Do you believe the Warren Commission word-for-word? (If so, then I am concerned about your ability to gloss over obvious errors.) If you take the WC with a grain of salt, what prompts you to have unshakable belief that power groups inside and outside of the US Government haven't puppet-stringed it from time to time? Have you read credible research on these subjects? Not crackpots, those are everywhere. I mean well-researched, documented, foot-noted work. I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from so I can suggest a Reading List for you so we can intelligently discuss this. Thanks!
      - IIIUwe299 9y ago
        > I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from so I can suggest a Reading List for you so we can intelligently discuss this. I'd like to point out how smug this line is, in case you haven't noticed. This kind of thing isn't useful to HN discussion, imo.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    There is only evidence of coups only in cheapo banana republics, where life is cheap, stakes low, and few care about there being evidence or not. Big western countries can't afford to leave evidence in any internal meddling. Heck, even the "final solution" orders weren't put in signing, and that wasn't even a regime that cared much for their public perception in the matter... http://www.historynet.com/did-hitler-sign-a-document-authorizing-the-killing-of-the-jews.htm http://www.historynet.com/did-hitler-sign-a-document-authori... (Besides, absence of evidence, as any scientist knows, is not evidence of absence).
- trgv 9y ago
  I, for one, will not act like I knew it all along.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  What would be the purpose of a coup to put Lyndon Johnson in power?
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Then why has the CIA fought so hard to redact these documents, including in 2017 almost telling the president he can't release these docs despite wanting to. Because that's what those kind of agencies do. What did you expect, to have them censor/falsify documents AND say they are OK to release because they're censored/falsified? I don't know whether they did anything, but if they did censor those in advance, then of course they were going to pretend they didn't and fight fiercely against them being released...
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    Also, it's highly unlikely that the people who did the censoring _then_ are overseeing the release _now_. "Here's a pile of decades-old documents we've been asked to release. Probably someone has already removed, or maybe never even wrote down, anything sensitive. But maybe not. Either way, it's your ass on the line. Have a nice day."
    - GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
      True, however, the 'mindset' at agencies (like companies) tends to get baked into the organizational DNA.
      - duncan_bayne 9y ago
        Sure, I agree. I think the scenario I described is one of the ways that culture gets built, and reinforced, over the years.
- lb1lf 9y ago
  One can but wonder what criteria were used when deciding what to redact and not. Out of curiosity, I searched for a number of phrases relating to my native Norway, and amongst other things found a document describing the reaction to the assassination of Norwegian PM at the time, Einar Gerhardsen. The document (144-10001-10349.pdf, page 2) quoted a speech he had made on TV on the evening of the assassination, redacting out a couple of words - 'Premier GERHARDSEN, in a speech during these programs, said that the death of KENNEDY was a great loss not only for Norway but for the whole world. He said "When he <redacted> we ourselves <redacted> feel secure." The legal basis for the redactions is 44USC2107(5)(g)(2)(D)b(iii), but I haven't gotten around to searching for the relevant paragraph to try to guess what may have triggered the redactions. Should be relatively easy to find the transcript of Gerhardsen's speech, though. Consider my curiosity piqued.
aphextron 9y ago
>I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not. Of course. This was nothing more than a completely absurd bit of theater put on to throw meat to His tinfoil hat wearing, Alex Jones watching base of supporters.
cookiecaper 9y ago
People leave a lot of accidental breadcrumbs. Consider that even what people believe to be carefully anonymized data sets can be reverse-engineered down to a scarily specific group of people, if not all the way down to the specific person individually. [0] [1] Aside from the fact that some people have a conveniently weak definition of "anonymous", this is part of why it's worrisome to have so many people collecting and reselling browsing data and other types of user analytics, despite their repeated assertions of anonymity. It's perfectly plausible to believe that with the right shuffle of declassified data, substantial new information will become apparent. [0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization
prawn 9y ago
Generally yes, but there are occasional cases where information is preserved. There's a really interesting podcast about one instance: http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/
jcranmer 9y ago
Nixon's effective admission to knowledge of the Watergate scandal and cover-up was recorded on tape. And this is someone who probably knew of/ordered/did himself the erasure of 18½ minutes of tape, the contents of which are still unknown today. Even if you believe that such first-order evidence didn't exist, bureaucracies generate massive amounts of second-order evidence that's hard to erase. For example, if you believe that the conspiracy selected Oswald as a fall guy, you have to ask how; and the simplest way of doing that would be to send someone down to the records archive and search for a good one... which would be noted as someone accessing the records [1]. This is the problem with conspiracy theories: to explain the lack of evidence, they have to expand the conspiracy to be able to erase that evidence, which generates more evidence that needs to be erased. [1] I don't know if such accesses were logged back then, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  I'd imagine the opsec would be much tighter for a presidential assasination/coup than Watergate. The punishment for the former would be execution, the latter resulted in a simple resignation.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
    Exactly. Speaking of 18-minute-gaps: https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2011/02/cracking-watergates-infamous-18-12-minute-gap https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2011/02/cracking-waterga... These guys say 'nothing particularly special' was in the gap: https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/after-40-years-john-dean-re-examines-nixon-tapes-18-minute-gap/ https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/after-40-years-john-dean-re-ex... Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes
Iv 9y ago
Black Op: If you heard even a hint of it, it ain’t black. Anyone who tells you about a black op is a liar. Does Stratfor do black ops? You’ll never know. From "Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms" https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Useful_Baffling_and_Strange_Intelligence_Terms.pdf https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Usefu...
- matthberg 9y ago
  That source is amazing, fascinating to see a glimpse of the culture there. I especially liked "Green Carder", "Center-of-Gravity", and "Hoover's Dress".
  - princekolt 9y ago
    It feels like reading the glossary of a well-written novel. Except it is (probably) all true.
  - Iv 9y ago
    Keep in mind that Stratfor is probably too young and to small to actually do anything more than pretending to be an actual agent and is probably doing mostly passive/analysis. I think half of this document is about circlejerking about their imaginary capabilities.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  > Duplicitous little bastards.... Israeli Intelligence Is this legit?
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    You'll never know.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
    "Si non e vero, e ben trovato", as they used to say in Abyssinia.
  - 9y ago

I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not.

peacethroughx 9y ago

Then why has the CIA fought so hard to redact these documents, including in 2017 almost telling the president he can't release these docs despite wanting to. Fact: the docs are being held illegally due to the CIA's pressure (threats?) on the President. The law said 25 years and all the docs have not been released. Many are still redacted. It's downright scary that the current CIA is still defending its past crimes. Soon it will be an accepted fact that the CIA committed a coup in America, and everyone will act like they knew it all along and it's boring. People are sheep and the CIA is the shepherd.

saagarjha 9y ago
A coup to do…what? What was the motive behind it? What evidence is there to back this up?
- peacethroughx 9y ago
  The movie JFK is basically a documentary (with many wrong details) and is the reason for the law that lead to these files being released. You know how people say it would be impossible to cover up something so big? It would have to leak? Well, it did. The CIA/Mafia/Cuban assassination connection is firmly established fact now. Among many other important facts use to be "conspiracy theories." Motivations tl;dr https://i.imgur.com/WEjm2ig.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WEjm2ig.jpg
  - Tade0 9y ago
    > and befriending our enemies( Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland ) Odd choice of countries.
    - cat199 9y ago
      in the cold war? not really..
    - nl 9y ago
      Yugoslavia, Poland They were in the news around then because of possible attempts they were making to break away from Soviet control. Yugoslavia had already broken with the Soviets and in 1961 setup the non-aligned movement[1]. In 1956 the Poles had refused to vote against the UN resolution condemning Soviet intervention (invasion) of Hungary and there was some hope that these splits could have been exploited. This isn't entirely impossible. In 1970 Poland and West Germany signed a treaty, which to some degree had been brought about by the Catholic church (which had been suppressed by the Polish goverment in the early '60's). Counter-factuals are hard, but Catholic JFK may have been able to change things earlier, there. Of course some couldn't see any distinction between the Poles and the Russians ("all commies") and so you get posters like this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia#The_1948_Yugoslavia-Soviet_split https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia#The_1948_Yugoslavia...
  - ablation 9y ago
    > The movie JFK is basically a documentary Goodness me, no. Have you read the sources Oliver Stone borrowed from when cooking it up? To say they are fantasies would be giving a disservice to the word.
- dleslie 9y ago
  Money. CIA drug smuggling was/is a huge cash cow. Kennedy was planning to "shatter [the agency] to a thousand pieces" and so had to die.
Danihan 9y ago
Quite a worldview you have there. Is there any actual evidence of a CIA coup in the US?
- nl 9y ago
  Is there any actual evidence of a CIA coup in the US? Of course there isn't. But as the OP says, the lack of evidence doesn't mean it won't soon be accepted that it happened (although I suspect this wasn't what they were trying to say). The "9/11 was a US government conspiracy" (and various versions of that) makes it clear how easy it is to sell conspiracy theories, and that was only 16 years ago.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
    What would you consider as 'actual evidence'? Do you believe the Warren Commission word-for-word? (If so, then I am concerned about your ability to gloss over obvious errors.) If you take the WC with a grain of salt, what prompts you to have unshakable belief that power groups inside and outside of the US Government haven't puppet-stringed it from time to time? Have you read credible research on these subjects? Not crackpots, those are everywhere. I mean well-researched, documented, foot-noted work. I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from so I can suggest a Reading List for you so we can intelligently discuss this. Thanks!
    - IIIUwe299 9y ago
      > I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from so I can suggest a Reading List for you so we can intelligently discuss this. I'd like to point out how smug this line is, in case you haven't noticed. This kind of thing isn't useful to HN discussion, imo.
- coldtea 9y ago
  There is only evidence of coups only in cheapo banana republics, where life is cheap, stakes low, and few care about there being evidence or not. Big western countries can't afford to leave evidence in any internal meddling. Heck, even the "final solution" orders weren't put in signing, and that wasn't even a regime that cared much for their public perception in the matter... http://www.historynet.com/did-hitler-sign-a-document-authorizing-the-killing-of-the-jews.htm http://www.historynet.com/did-hitler-sign-a-document-authori... (Besides, absence of evidence, as any scientist knows, is not evidence of absence).
trgv 9y ago
I, for one, will not act like I knew it all along.
Spooky23 9y ago
What would be the purpose of a coup to put Lyndon Johnson in power?
coldtea 9y ago
>Then why has the CIA fought so hard to redact these documents, including in 2017 almost telling the president he can't release these docs despite wanting to. Because that's what those kind of agencies do. What did you expect, to have them censor/falsify documents AND say they are OK to release because they're censored/falsified? I don't know whether they did anything, but if they did censor those in advance, then of course they were going to pretend they didn't and fight fiercely against them being released...
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  Also, it's highly unlikely that the people who did the censoring _then_ are overseeing the release _now_. "Here's a pile of decades-old documents we've been asked to release. Probably someone has already removed, or maybe never even wrote down, anything sensitive. But maybe not. Either way, it's your ass on the line. Have a nice day."
  - GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
    True, however, the 'mindset' at agencies (like companies) tends to get baked into the organizational DNA.
    - duncan_bayne 9y ago
      Sure, I agree. I think the scenario I described is one of the ways that culture gets built, and reinforced, over the years.
lb1lf 9y ago
One can but wonder what criteria were used when deciding what to redact and not. Out of curiosity, I searched for a number of phrases relating to my native Norway, and amongst other things found a document describing the reaction to the assassination of Norwegian PM at the time, Einar Gerhardsen. The document (144-10001-10349.pdf, page 2) quoted a speech he had made on TV on the evening of the assassination, redacting out a couple of words - 'Premier GERHARDSEN, in a speech during these programs, said that the death of KENNEDY was a great loss not only for Norway but for the whole world. He said "When he <redacted> we ourselves <redacted> feel secure." The legal basis for the redactions is 44USC2107(5)(g)(2)(D)b(iii), but I haven't gotten around to searching for the relevant paragraph to try to guess what may have triggered the redactions. Should be relatively easy to find the transcript of Gerhardsen's speech, though. Consider my curiosity piqued.

aphextron 9y ago

>I feel like if these files revealed anything groundbreaking they wouldn't have existed. If there was anything that needed to be covered up, it wouldn't have been done on the books, classified or not. Of course. This was nothing more than a completely absurd bit of theater put on to throw meat to His tinfoil hat wearing, Alex Jones watching base of supporters.

cookiecaper 9y ago

People leave a lot of accidental breadcrumbs. Consider that even what people believe to be carefully anonymized data sets can be reverse-engineered down to a scarily specific group of people, if not all the way down to the specific person individually. [0] [1] Aside from the fact that some people have a conveniently weak definition of "anonymous", this is part of why it's worrisome to have so many people collecting and reselling browsing data and other types of user analytics, despite their repeated assertions of anonymity. It's perfectly plausible to believe that with the right shuffle of declassified data, substantial new information will become apparent. [0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization

prawn 9y ago

Generally yes, but there are occasional cases where information is preserved. There's a really interesting podcast about one instance: http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/

jcranmer 9y ago

Nixon's effective admission to knowledge of the Watergate scandal and cover-up was recorded on tape. And this is someone who probably knew of/ordered/did himself the erasure of 18½ minutes of tape, the contents of which are still unknown today. Even if you believe that such first-order evidence didn't exist, bureaucracies generate massive amounts of second-order evidence that's hard to erase. For example, if you believe that the conspiracy selected Oswald as a fall guy, you have to ask how; and the simplest way of doing that would be to send someone down to the records archive and search for a good one... which would be noted as someone accessing the records [1]. This is the problem with conspiracy theories: to explain the lack of evidence, they have to expand the conspiracy to be able to erase that evidence, which generates more evidence that needs to be erased. [1] I don't know if such accesses were logged back then, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
I'd imagine the opsec would be much tighter for a presidential assasination/coup than Watergate. The punishment for the former would be execution, the latter resulted in a simple resignation.
- GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
  Exactly. Speaking of 18-minute-gaps: https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2011/02/cracking-watergates-infamous-18-12-minute-gap https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2011/02/cracking-waterga... These guys say 'nothing particularly special' was in the gap: https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/after-40-years-john-dean-re-examines-nixon-tapes-18-minute-gap/ https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/after-40-years-john-dean-re-ex... Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes

Iv 9y ago

Black Op: If you heard even a hint of it, it ain’t black. Anyone who tells you about a black op is a liar. Does Stratfor do black ops? You’ll never know. From "Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms" https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Useful_Baffling_and_Strange_Intelligence_Terms.pdf https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/The_Stratfor_Glossary_of_Usefu...

matthberg 9y ago
That source is amazing, fascinating to see a glimpse of the culture there. I especially liked "Green Carder", "Center-of-Gravity", and "Hoover's Dress".
- princekolt 9y ago
  It feels like reading the glossary of a well-written novel. Except it is (probably) all true.
- Iv 9y ago
  Keep in mind that Stratfor is probably too young and to small to actually do anything more than pretending to be an actual agent and is probably doing mostly passive/analysis. I think half of this document is about circlejerking about their imaginary capabilities.
King-Aaron 9y ago
> Duplicitous little bastards.... Israeli Intelligence Is this legit?
- IncRnd 9y ago
  You'll never know.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  "Si non e vero, e ben trovato", as they used to say in Abyssinia.
- 9y ago