The passage of the National Security Act in July 1947 legislated the changes in the Executive branch that had been under discussion since 1945. The Act established an independent Air Force, provided for coordination by a committee of service chiefs, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and a Secretary of Defense, and created the National Security Council (NSC). The CIG became an independent department and was renamed the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the Act, the CIA's mission was only loosely defined, since efforts to thrash out the CIA's duties in specific terms would have contributed to the tension surrounding the unification of the services. The four general tasks assigned to the Agency were to advise the NSC on matters related to national security; to make recommendations to the NSC regarding the coordination of intelligence activities of the Departments; to correlate and evaluate intelligence and provide for its appropriate dissemination and "to perform such other functions ... as the NSC will from time to time direct...."The numbers don't lie! At the end of a detailed statistical study, the CIA will be found, like a spider in its web, at the bump on a bell curve, at the very nexus of murder, mayhem and heinous acts of terrorism that it has exported across the globe and behind the deaths of US citizens in America. CIA atrocities may be categorized.--CIA Organizational Development, [Adapted from: United States Senate Select Committee on Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence -- Book I, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 26 April 1976, pages 102-118.]
- Secret Wars
- Assassinations
- Subversions of targeted regimes
- Overt terrorism
- Support of other terrorist organizations
- Exploitation and/or creation of terrorist organizations like 'al Qaeda'.
- Drug sales, primarily cocaine and its derivative --crack.
- Domestic Assassinations and acts of terrorism
In Latin America, Central America, this same system is working. If the people don't like it, you organize the police into death squads, as we've done in many countries, including, conspicuously, El Salvador, and you kill enough of them that they are emasculated. They can't do anything about it. They are crippled. They are repressed, suppressed and oppressed, and you can get by with this system of milking the countries to your will and to your way. The [Sen. Frank] Church Committee of 1975 ..... Again this is not a lecture about the Secret Wars of the CIA. That's a separate lecture. I could give it again, but it takes a full hour in its own right. But you must know how the CIA weaves into this war complex - this war machinery of ours.According to Stockwell, the Church Committee of 1975 discovered over thirteen thousand covert operations since World War II.--John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
Late in 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA was not only destabilizing foreign governments, but was also conducting illegal intelligence operations against thousands of American citizens. On January 27, 1975, an aroused Senate voted overwhelmingly to establish a special 11-member investigating body along the lines of the recently concluded Watergate Committee. Under the chairmanship of Idaho Senator Frank Church, with Texas Senator John Tower as vice-chairman, the select committee was given nine months and 150 staffers to complete its work. The so-called Church Committee ran into immediate resistance from the Ford administration, concerned about exposing American intelligence operations and suspicious of Church's budding presidential ambitions. The committee interviewed 800 individuals, and conducted 250 executive and 21 public hearings. At the first televised hearing, staged in the Senate Caucus Room, Chairman Church dramatically displayed a CIA poison dart gun to highlight the committee's discovery that the CIA directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin sufficient to kill thousands.Stockwell maintains that many of these 'covert operations' were violent and led to wars. Examples include the propaganda campaign that led directly to the Korean and Viet Nam wars.
...we have so many of them in the public record that it's obviously very difficult to know exactly how many people died in Vietnam or in Korea or in Nicaragua or in the Congo - but still, working with conservative figures we come up with a minimum figure of SIX MILLION PEOPLE killed in the Secret Wars of the CIA through its de-stabilizations over these past forty years: One million people killed in the Korean War;
Two million people killed in Vietnam;
One to two million people killed in Cambodia;
Eight hundred thousand people killed in Indonesia;
Fifty thousand people killed in Angola.




