CIA Tries to ‘Edit the Past’ With Release of Declassified Documents on Internet

There is more to the CIA’s online release of unclassified documents than meets the eye, security expert Dmitry Efimov told Sputnik.

On Wednesday the CIA published roughly 930,000 documents online, totaling more than 1 million pages, which had previously only been accessible on computers at the National Archives in Maryland.
The database, which is searchable via the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), contains information from the 1940s to the 1990s, including reports from the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The CIA had planned to publish the documents at the end of 2017, but finished the work ahead of schedule. The agency began the project following a Freedom of Information Act injunction launched in 2014 by Muckrock, a non-profit news organization.

However, not everybody is convinced that the documents in the CREST database are genuine. Security expert Dmitry Efimov, a member of Moscow Council’s Advisory Committee on Security, told Radio Sputnik that he suspects many of the files are fakes.

“I think this was published on the personal orders of CIA Director Brennan, a famous neocon who is leaving along with Obama and who is probably using this opportunity to create a new stream of misinformation,” Efimov said.

Commenting on the release, CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak insisted that the documents, which appear redacted, are genuine and were not released on a selective basis.

“None of this is cherry-picked,” Horniak said.

“It’s the full history. It’s good and bads.”

However, Efimov claims that the release is an attempt by the CIA to rewrite history in order to assist its political ambitions.

Among CREST’s revelations is that the CIA carried out research on topics like UFO’s, telepathy and psychic phenomena. For example, the Stargate Project, which ran from 1978 to 1995 and was intended to investigate psychic phenomena, even interviewed Israeli celebrity psychic Uri Geller in the 1980s to see if his supposed paranormal abilities could be of use in military and domestic intelligence applications.
This kind of disclosure is a way to distract attention from political topics, Efimov said.

“Disclosure of the ‘Stargate’ CIA program is a wonderful theme, a great way to divert the consciousness of American society away from real problems. Just imagine how you can use that topic on CNN, in order to bring it to the attention of all American housewives. I don’t exclude the possibility that some more fine papers will appear, some kind of reports about something, which predicted something, we will get the names of some new American prophets. That is, the construction of a mythical American history that will distract the attention of Americans,” Efimov said.

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