Ray McGovern – We are going to keep on moving forward
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Lamar Waldron (2012) Watergate: The Hidden History (ISBN: 978-1-61902-082-5)
> > > After Watergate, CIA Director Richard Helms not only limited the FBI’s investigation at a critical time, but he would also withhold information from investigators and lie to Congress. Helms was continuing the pattern he began in 1962, when he started withholding information on his continuation of the CIAMafia plots from Presidents and two CIA Directors, before he ascended to that same office. Like Nixon, Helms would set the tone for the CIA’s lack of compliance with Congressional investigations, but in Helms’s case it would far outlast his own tenure as CIA Director. In some ways, the cover-ups Helms began in the week after Watergate are maintained by the Agency today: Current estimates of the number of relevant CIA files that remain unreleased in 2012 despite the 1992 JFK Act—including important files about Hunt, Barker, Rosselli, Almeida, and AMWORLD—range from fifty thousand pages to over a million. Estimates have to suffice, since the CIA and the National Archives have not revealed the exact number. However, files that have been released indicate that most of those unreleased files are in some way connected to people involved in the CIAMafia plots, including participants such as Santo Trafficante and Manuel Artime. That demonstrates the sensitivity about the issue that remains even today, which helps to explain why so much was hidden or withheld in the aftermath of the Watergate arrests. < < <
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Geredigeerd citaat – David Omand (2018) Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence. ISBN-13: 9780198785590.
> > > Most people in most of the world usually live in a state of peace most or all of the time. However, developments over recent years have served to blur the boundaries between war, covert action, and intelligence gathering.
Two developments are particularly significant in this respect. The first is the development of what has come to be termed hybrid warfare, an approach that can be applied by non-state actors, such as ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and by states, as with Russia in Crimea and farther afield. Hybrid warfare is a fluid concept, reflecting the various combinations of techniques that it comprises, but it usually denotes a cyber and a conventional dimension to conflict where the cyber dimension can be utilized to alter perceptions by penetrating, wrong-footing, and unsettling an opponent in support of a broader political aim. This has impacted the purpose and function of intelligence. The second development relates to the post-9/11 counterterrorism roles that some intelligence agencies, principally the CIA, have been required to perform and their implications for understandings of intelligence.
These developments have two consequences worth noting here. First, they both heighten the importance of recognizing the need to apply some ethical “rules of the game” to this sphere of activity. Second, they highlight the complications that arise in thinking about the ethics of intelligence in terms of the extension of Just War principles. The advent of hybrid warfare complicates yet further the bases of ethical judgment. Conversely, though, in a sense the war on terror intelligence roles make this simpler insofar as when intelligence plays a frontline military role, as the CIA did in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, we don’t need to trouble ourselves with trying to formulate an intelligence equivalent of Just War theory; we can simply apply Just War theory itself. < < <