Political Crimes and Abuse of Power

Washington, D.C., June 5, 2001 – Thirty years ago this month, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand side of the front page.  Next to that picture, on the right, was the headline over Neil Sheehan's first story on the Pentagon Papers, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement."  Nixon did not read the story (so he says on tape in his 12:18 p.m. phone call with Alexander Haig).

On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor. The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, who has published several articles on Condor.

Update May 10, 2001: The National Security Archive recently received responses to FOIA requests we sent out earlier this year on Vladimiro Montesinos. These new documents focus on Montesinos' early career and links with the United States in the 1970s. These documents deal with the unauthorized trip to the United States that Montesinos made in September 1976 and his later arrest, detention and cashiering from the army in 1977.

After twenty-seven years of withholding details about covert activities following the 1973 military coup in Chile, the CIA released a report yesterday acknowledging its close relations with General Augusto Pinochet’s violent regime. The report, “CIA Activities in Chile,” revealed for the first time that the head of the Chile’s feared secret police, DINA, was a paid CIA asset in 1975, and that CIA contacts continued with him long after he dispatched his agents to Washington D.C.

Introduction In July 1994, the Guatemalan government and the URNG signed the Human Rights Accord establishing the Historical Clarification Commission. That same month, the National Security Archive began work on a Guatemala Documentation Project, an effort to obtain the release of secret U.S. files on Guatemala. The project's first objective was to support the human rights investigations of the Clarification Commission. We believed that the commission would benefit from access to declassified U.S.

On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named The National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 "for serving as an essential journalistic resource and for expanding access to previously classified documents" including, over the past year: 
 

On October 8, 1999, the U.S. Government released 1100 documents on Chile. Among them is a declassified State Department report on the case of Charles Horman, an American citizen who was killed by the Chilean military in the days following the coup. This document was released once before in 1980, pursuant to a lawsuit filed by the Horman family. At that time, significant portions were blacked out. The version released today reveals what was censored: the State Department's conclusions that the CIA may have had "an unfortunate part" in Horman's death.

June 30, 1999--The National Security Archive, Center for National Security Studies and Human Rights Watch hailed today’s release of more than 20,000 pages of U.S. documents on Chile. The records, estimated to total more than 5,300 in number, were declassified pursuant to a February l, 1999 White House "tasker" directing U.S.

Washington, D.C., May 20, 1999 – The Guatemalan military kept detailed records of its death squad operations, according to a document released by four human rights and public interest groups today. The army log reveals the fate of scores of Guatemalan citizens who were "disappeared" by security forces during the mid-1980s.

Washington, D.C. October 23, 1998 -- The CIA yesterday declassified its secret Inspector General's report on controversial CIA activities in Honduras during the 1980's. The report states officially for the first time: "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and were linked to "death squad activities." (p. 2) "Reporting inadequacies" by the CIA station in Honduras "precluded CIA Headquarters from understanding the scope of human rights abuses in Honduras." (p.