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Critics say CIA report just as relevant today

While the CIA was lauded for releasing 700 pages documenting some of its most egregious abuses from 1950 to 1970, critics said the US spy agency remains secretive about its current controversial activities, critics said.

"We don't know everything that's going on today. But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today," said David Barrett, political scientist at Villanova University, author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, speaking to the New York Times.

The unflattering report details some of the CIA's worst historical abuses, collectively known within the agency, with more than a hint of irony, as the "family jewels."

"This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of controversial material" in almost a decade, said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a watchdog group whose 1992 Freedom of Information Act request prompted the release of the documents.

The disclosures, which were made available on Tuesday, were the first extensive release of original records by the spy agency. The documents are posted on the CIA's Web site.

The report, which comes a decade and a half after the original request, makes many revelations that were once jealously guarded, including several CIA plots against foreign leaders.

The agency offered Mafia figures US$150,000 to kill Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro prior to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

The report also catalogues illegal domestic spying by the agency and its links to the Watergate burglars whose arrests eventually toppled the presidency of Richard Nixon.

It was the CIA's involvement on the margins of the Watergate scandal that led then-CIA director James Schlesinger to compile the "family jewels" file in 1973, asking each CIA component to send him a summary of activities it thought might have violated the law.

The document is mum, however, on present day activities, which some critics say are every bit as objectionable as some of the worst transgressions of the past.
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