The Real Roots of the CIA's Rendition and Black Sites Program

[MinM]

http://www.truthout.org/the-real-roots-cias-rendition-black-sites-program56956

Wednesday 17 February 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed's torture places the implementation of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA's secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed "black sites" by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950's with the CIA's Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency's own files. This is the so-called "Lyle O. Kelly case." The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents...

After being relocated to the United States, Dimitrov either remained bitter or resumed his bitterness toward the CIA. In June 1960, he contacted the CIA's Domestic Contact Division and requested financial assistance for himself and additional covert support and assistance for activities against Bulgaria. In 1961, he contacted an editor at Parade, a Sunday newspaper magazine then with reported strong ties to the CIA, with the intention of telling his story. A Parade editor contacted the CIA and was informed, according to CIA documents, that Dimitrov was "an imposter" who was "disreputable, unreliable, and full of wild stories about the CIA."

About ten years after the JFK assassination, Dimitrov, operating sometimes under the aliases Lyle Kelly, James Adams, General Dimitre Dimitrov and Donald A. Donaldson, informed a number of people that he had information about who ordered the murder of JFK and who had committed the act. Reportedly, he had encountered the assassins while he had been imprisoned in Panama. He also told several people that he knew about military snipers who had murdered Martin Luther King. In 1977, Dimitrov actually met with US Sen. Frank Church, head of a Senate Committee investigating the CIA, and President Gerald Ford to share his information. Dimitrov said after the meeting that Ford had asked him to keep the information confidential until he could verify a number of facts. Immediately following the March 29, 1977, death of Lee Harvey Oswald's friend George de Mohrenschildt, Dimitrov became extremely frightened and contacted a reporter with a foreign television station who either mistakenly, or intentionally, revealed Dimitrov's name publicly on American television. Not long after this, Dimitrov disappeared in Europe where he had fled. He has never been seen or heard from since. Former CIA officials say privately, "Dimitrov was murdered" and "His body will never be found."

A 1977 memorandum written, before Dimitrov's disappearance, by an attorney in the CIA's General Counsel's Office, A. R. Cinquegrana, states: " to me that the nature of the Agency's treatment of Dimitrov might be something which should be brought to the attention of appropriate officials both within and outside the Agency. The fact that he is still active and is making allegations connected with the Kennedy assassination may add yet another dimension to this story." ...

[bobthedrummer]

1. CIA Domestic Operations Division: DU thread #3 (started 8-5-09)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6225784

(Post 37 in that thread is a pdf of the CIA's Inspector General's post-Watergate ARTICHOKE review from The National Security Archive, yet all the hyperlinks are related to your thread, MinM.)