By Andrew Mitrovica

The CIA has come clean. At least that’s what the U.S. espionage agency wants you to believe now that it has released a 702-page dossier detailing its covert operations during much of the Cold War.

Dubbed the “family jewels,” the documents catalogue the agency’s involvement in secret drug testing on unsuspecting U.S. citizens (which mirror CIA financed brainwashing experiments on Canadian psychiatric patients), rampant and illegal spying on reporters and anti-war demonstrators and a bizarre assortment of assassination plots against foreign leaders.

The airing of the CIA’s soiled laundry was designed, in part, to reassure Americans and the world that the bad old days when the agency’s cowboys ran amok around the globe are over. The suddenly repentant spy service has emerged from its disreputable past with a new-found fidelity to the rule of law.

The problem with this rosy construct is that it is demonstrably false.

Indeed, the nature and scope of misdeeds by the CIA and other intelligence services today arguably eclipse those of the Vietnam War period in terms of the threat they pose to civil liberties and human rights.

Methods of gathering so-called “intelligence” once deemed illegal or at least that tested lawful boundaries now have the veneer of legality. This new and convenient legal regime has been achieved largely through secret executive orders issued by President George Bush and enacted with the complicity of scores of Western democracies.

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