Brazil Truth Commission Releases Report
National Security Archive hails efforts by investigators, victim’s families to uncover truth
Obama Administration to Declassify Hundreds of Secret U.S. Records For Report Follow-up
Report released on International Human Rights Day; names hundreds of perpetrators
For more information, contact:
peter.kornbluh@gmail.com or 202 / 374-7281
Washington, DC, December 11, 2014 — Almost thirty years after the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the Comissao Nacional da Verdade [National Truth Commission] today released its long awaited report on human rights violations by the security forces between 1964 and 1985. The report, which took two-and-a-half years to complete and totals over 1000 pages, represents the first formal attempt by Brazil as a nation to record its repressive past and provide a detailed accounting of the system of repression, of the victims of human rights violations, as well as the identities of those who committed those crimes.
In contrast to the U.S. Senate report on torture released yesterday in Washington which redacted even the pseudonyms of CIA personnel who engaged in torture, the Brazilian report actually identifies over 375 perpetrators of human rights crimes by name.
The report contains detailed chapters on the structure and methods of the repression during the military era, including targeted violence against women and children. The commission identified over 400 individuals killed by the military, many of them “disappeared” as the military sought to hide its abuses. During its investigation, the Commission located and identified the remains of 33 of the disappeared; some 200 other victims remain missing.
The report also sheds significant light on Brazil’s role in the cross-border regional repression known as Operation Condor. In a chapter titled “International Connections: From Repressive Alliances in the Southern Cone to Operation Condor,” the Commission report details Brazil’s military ties to the coup in Chile, and support for the Pinochet regime, as well as identifies Argentine citizens captured and killed in Brazil as part of a Condor collaboration between the Southern Cone military regimes.
This report opens a Pandora’s box of historical and legal accountability for Brazilians. For now it provides a verdict of history, but eventually the evidence compiled by the commission’s investigation could lead to a judicial accounting. “The Truth Commission’s final report is a major step for human rights in Brazil,” according to Brown University scholar, James Green, “and the pursuit of justice for the victims of the state’s terror.”
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/brazil-truth-commission-releases-report/
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Unredacted, the Archive blog – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/
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Torture Report Finally Released
Senate Intelligence Committee Summary of CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program Concludes CIA Misled Itself, Congress, the President about Lack of Effectiveness
Committee Details 20 Most Frequent CIA Claims that Torture Stopped Terrorist Plots, Cites CIA’s Own Documents to Show Claims “Wrong in Fundamental Respects”
Outside Contractors Ran Torture Program, Earned $1800 per Day, $81 Million Overall, Had No Prior Experience in Interrogation, No Arabic, but Sold CIA on “Hard” Measures
Multiple CIA Officers Protested Program as “Train Wreak”, Refused to Participate, But CIA Directors Tenet, Goss, Hayden Overruled Criticism and Misled Congress
CIA Inserted Factually Inaccurate Claims into Bush’s Daily Brief and Public Speeches
For more information, Tom Blanton 202.994.7000, nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, December 9, 2014 — The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today released the executive summary of its long-awaited “Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” describing in more than 500 pages a dysfunctional agency so unprepared to handle suspected terrorist detainees after 9/11, that the CIA bought into private contractors’ proposals for torture, and then lied to Congress, President Bush, the Justice Department, the public, and to itself about the purported effectiveness of the program.
The Senate release includes a 6-page foreword by committee chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA), a 19-page list of 20 specific Findings and Conclusions, and a 499-page Executive Summary which details the development of the torture program after 9/11. The longest single section of the Summary, from page 172 to page 400, eviscerates the CIA’s “eight primary CIA effectiveness representations” along with 12 “secondary” ones by showing either there was “no relationship” between the cited success and detainee information “during or after” the CIA’s use of torture, or that such information was otherwise available and even obtained prior to the use of torture.
Including 2,725 footnotes to specific CIA documents, the Senate report shows a pattern of repeated factual inaccuracies by CIA in communications with the Justice Department (to get legal cover for the program), with the White House (including false information inserted in the President’s Daily Brief and one of President Bush’s major speeches), with the Congress (Appendix 3 starting on page 462 provides more than 30 pages of false statements in testimony by former CIA director Michael Hayden), and even inside the Agency itself.
The report cites CIA documents showing CIA officers at the secret detention sites repeatedly protested the torture program — one interrogator called the program a “train wreak” [sic] and wrote “I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” But higher-ups, including CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Hayden, overruled objections and kept the program going until President Obama ended it in 2009. The head of CIA counterterrorism operations, Jose Rodriguez, even reprimanded CIA officers at one site for their protests, warning them to refrain from using “speculative language as to the legality of given activities” in CIA cables.
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive – http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/report.html
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FRANK MANKIEWICZ: SECRET INTERMEDIARY TO CUBA
Famous Political Figure Carried Messages from Kissinger to Castro
Mankiewicz Played Key Back-Channel Role in Secret 1970s Effort to Normalize U.S.-Cuban Relations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 494
Posted November 24, 2014
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Justin Anstett
For more information, contact:
peter.kornbluh@gmail.com or 202 / 374-7281
Washington, DC, November 24, 2014 — Frank Mankiewicz, the renowned political and media strategist and former president of National Public Radio, served as a “special channel” of communication between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Cuban commandante Fidel Castro in the mid 1970s, according to formerly classified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. When Mankiewicz died at age 90 on October 28, 2014, his obituaries highlighted his historic roles as Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary and George McGovern’s presidential campaign strategist. But his missions as Kissinger’s designated emissary to arrange talks with Castro in a top secret effort to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations received scant attention.
A phone call from Mankiewicz to Kissinger in April 1974 to brief the secretary of state on a forthcoming trip to Havana to interview Fidel Castro set in motion Washington’s first serious back-channel diplomacy to restore normal relations with Cuba. Kissinger used the opportunity of Mankiewicz’s trip in June to send a handwritten letter to the Cuban leader suggesting secret talks; when Mankiewicz returned, he carried a positive note from Castro to Kissinger, along with a box of Cohiba cigars from the Cuban leader to the Secretary of State.
In September 1974, and again in late January 1975, Mankiewicz carried additional messages from Kissinger to Castro; he also shuttled back and forth to Cuba’s UN mission in New York to secretly arrange the first in a series of furtive meetings between Kissinger’s deputies and Fidel Castro’s representatives — a meeting which took place at La Guardia Airport on January 11, 1975.
The secret Kissinger-Castro talks, and Mankiewcz’s efforts to facilitate them, are detailed in a new book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana by Archive senior analyst, Peter Kornbluh, and American University Professor William M. LeoGrande. According to the book, Mankiewicz helped set in motion “the most serious effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba since Washington broke ties with Havana in January 1961.”
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive – http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB494/
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Unredacted, the Archive blog – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/
CIA Reactions to JFK Assassination Included Fear of Possible Soviet Strike against U.S.; Desire to “Bond” with LBJ
Web Posting Features New Articles from The CIA’s In-House Journal, “Studies in Intelligence”
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 493
Posted November 20, 2014
Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson
For more information contact:
202/994-7000, nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, November 20, 2014 — The CIA’s reactions to the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 51 years ago this week — went from initial shock to suspicions of Soviet or Cuban involvement, to increasingly bureaucratic concerns such as the desire to establish a positive “bond” with incoming President Lyndon Johnson, according to a newly declassified internal CIA article published for the first time today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org).
Fears that Moscow might have masterminded the president’s killing rose sharply when the CIA was unable to locate Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for 24-48 hours afterwards. Agency officials worried that he was “either hunkering down for an American reprisal, or possibly preparing to strike the United States.”
This article is one of several from the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence in-house journal that the agency recently released as a result of litigation by a former CIA official against his former employer. It appears today as part of an update to a compilation of similar articles the National Security Archive posted in June 2013.
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive – http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493/
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Unredacted, the Archive blog – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/
25th Anniversary of El Salvador Jesuit Murders
Declassified Documents from 1989 Show Initial U.S. Unwillingness to Consider Salvadoran Military’s Responsibility
As Evidence Grew, State Department Advised U.S. Ambassador: “Please Hold This Information Very Closely”
Spanish Court Moves Closer to Prosecution of Surviving Defendants
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 492
Posted November 16, 2014
Edited by Kate Doyle
Research Assistance by Alexandra Smith
For more information contact:
Kate Doyle 202/994-7000, kadoyle@email.gwu.edu
Washington, DC, November 16, 2014 — Twenty five years have passed since the horrifying murders in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, during a rampage by Salvadoran security forces in the early morning hours of November 16, 1989, on the campus of the University of Central America (UCA) in the country’s capital. It has been twenty five years of grieving by the victims’ families and the Jesuit community; and twenty five years of waiting for justice to identify and prosecute the killers.
The National Security Archive has spent the past quarter of a century collecting declassified US documents on El Salvador, including the Jesuit murders. Hundreds of those documents have been entered as evidence in a criminal human rights case against 20 alleged perpetrators currently under investigation in Spain. Thousands more are published in two Digital National Security Archive collections. Today, in commemoration of the deaths, the Archive posts ten documents written by US officials on the day of the murders and during the week that followed.
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive – http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB492/
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Unredacted, the Archive blog – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/