A Guide to the New Declassified CIA Archive

by James Corbett, The International Forecaster:

As you will know by now the Central Intelligence Agency is one of the organs through which the deep state manipulates the overt government in Washington. It is not without good cause that the initials “CIA” have been said to refer to “Criminals In Action.”

And so the latest “release” of 930,000 documents from the CIA’s archives needs to be treated with a healthy dose of realism. Criminals generally do not advertise their criminality, let alone put those advertisements in neatly organized, web-accessible databases for the public to peruse.

For those not in the know, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12958 in 1995 mandating the automatic declassification of all historically valuable government records older than 25 years (with “exemptions” for all sorts of “national security” reasons, of course). This includes the CIA, which in 2000 set up a system called “CREST” (CIA Records Search Tool) that the public can use to browse the declassified documents.

One problem with CREST: it has only ever been available to researchers at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. This seemed rather unfair to researchers elsewhere, what with this being the internet age and these documents being electronic, so in 2005 people started agitating for internet access to these documents.

As the New York Times notes in its own puff piece on the archive:

“After journalists at MuckRock, a news site, filed Freedom of Information Act requests for access to the Crest database, the C.I.A. said in 2015 that it would take 28 years to publish. In 2015, the agency cut its estimate to six years, and said the documents would be delivered on 1,200 compact discs at the price of $108,000.

“Put off by what he perceived as stalling, Mr. [Mike] Best [a journalist and archivist] crowdfunded $15,000 to print, scan and publish files himself. In October, the C.I.A. said it would post the files.”

And now, here they are. So what’s in there, you ask?

Well, the first thing you’ll notice when you look at the establishment fake news reports on the archive is that they tend to fall in one of four categories:

“Oh my gosh, UFOs and psychics, guys!”….. “Gee whiz, ain’t the CIA a funny old place?”

“Here’s some newly-released documents that change our understanding of an historical event, and here’s how we’ll spin them to keep the narrative in line with what we’ve been telling you all along.”

“Here’s an important document that we’ll tell you about, but we’re not going to link it!”

Read More @ TheInternationalForecaster.com