Silly, shameful old CIA tricks

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Back in the day, working as a full-time investigative reporter, I developed the habit of consuming my news unfiltered. Rather than "watch" or listen" or "read" the news, I spent my energy discovering it, and making it.

I was hardly unique. We were a generation of young muckrakers, much more inclined to produce news than consume it. When I first got inside the new, emerging web-based media companies, in the mid-'90s, it didn't take long to see that the dominant impulse online was to repackage, gossip or rant about the news.

The irony, to me, was all the talk of "disintermediation." Eliminating the middleman -- that's supposedly what the Internet was all about. So, travel agents would be headed to the garbage heap of history, along with car salesmen, pharmacists, insurance agents, real estate agents, and, following this line of thinking, journalists.

The problem is, as opposed to all those other middlemen, journalists were actual producers of a product (news), not resellers or repackagers. But they did such a bad job of telling their story that in my adult memory journalists fell from the rank of highly esteemed, poorly paid, hard-drinking professionals to widely despised, randomly paid, hard drinking individuals.

Inside the profession itself (and the academic branches that study it) is the concept of the Noble Reporter, rather like the Noble Savage, you might suppose. In this case, the concept is that whole gaggle of types of people, just out their doing their daily jobs, without much fanfare, collectively keep power accountable and therefore serve the public good, enabling democracy.

It takes an army of journalists to track down the powerful, expose the abuses of power, and illustrate the social injustice that results. In place of that idea, we've all been forced to witness the unveiling of Superstar "Journalists," who for my purposes will henceforth be known as Fake Journalists.

Fake Journalists include Jerry Rivers (stage name: Geraldo Rivera), Dan Rather, all news anchors, the 60 Minutes correspondents, all pundits, all sports radio hosts, and everyone on the payroll of Fox News, among many, many other posers and imposters. None of these people actually do any reporting; they sell and repackage a tiny portion of what actually matters in this world with various marketing strategies from the banal to the sensational.

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It should not be surprising, therefore, that the current head of the CIA could attract quite a fair portion of "news" coverage the other day when he announced the supposed release of all kinds of declassified skeletons from the CIA's old closets. The Director had a marketing plan; he labeled these musty files the "Family Jewels."

Thus, is our colorful language casually cheapened by bureaucrats, liars, and magic potion salesmen.

I took the time last night to read through all the documents, only to discover they are old friends, papers I've read many times before, 30 years ago, when they were initially made public. I've reproduced one page from the CIA files above just to show the kind of documents we are talking about here.

If anything, enough details have been freshly blacked out of these pages that they actually amount to a slightly cleaned up skeleton from what we got the last time around. There's nothing new here, other than the CIA believed it could hoodwink us, and partially rewrite history by redacting certain embarrassing details.

No deal. Some of us have good enough memories, plus some of us even save things! As previously revealed in this space, I am a pack rat, and among the volumes on my many bookshelves are Congressional printings of these same document caches, without the recent round of censorship clumsily instituted by the agency's keystone cop division.

The truth is the Bush administration is trying desperately to turn attention away from the horrible abuses at Abu Ghareb, Gitmo, and elsewhere by CIA and military agents in our time. Although these historical documents are worth a read, especially by those who were not involved in monitoring these revelations in the post-Watergate years, even more important is to pay attention to each new report by Sy Hersh and the small band of other reporters who continue to probe what the current CIA is doing in the name of another fakery -- the fake "War on Terror."

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