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Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.” It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.

Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.

But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.

In the mid-1970s, Rep. Otis Pike led a brave inquiry to rein in the excesses of the national security state. But the CIA and its defenders accused Pike of recklessness and vowed retaliation, assigning him to a political obscurity that continued to his recent death. Otis Pike, who headed the House of Representatives’ only wide-ranging and in-depth investigation into intelligence agency abuses in the 1970s, died on Jan. 20. A man who should have received a hero’s farewell passed with barely a mention. To explain the significance of what he did, however, requires a solid bit of back story.

Rep. Otis Pike, D-New York, took over what became known as the “Pike Committee.” Under Pike, the committee put some real teeth into the investigation, so much so that Ford’s White House and the CIA went on a public-relations counterattack, accusing the panel and its staff of recklessness. The CIA’s own historical review acknowledged as much:

“The final draft report of the Pike Committee reflected its sense of frustration with the Agency and the executive branch. Devoting an entire section of the report to describing its experience, the committee characterized Agency and White House cooperation as ‘virtually nonexistent.’ The report asserted that the executive branch practiced ‘footdragging, stonewalling, and deception’ in response to committee requests for information. It told the committee only what it wanted the committee to know. It restricted the dissemination of the information and ducked penetrating questions.”

The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.The dispute indicates that the White House is more involved than it has acknowledged in the unprecedented power struggle between the committee and the CIA, which has triggered charges that the agency searched the panel’s computers without authorization and has led to requests to the Justice Department for criminal investigations of CIA personnel and Senate aides.“These documents certainly raise the specter that the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School.The committee and the CIA declined to comment.

In a prepared statement to McClatchy, the White House confirmed that “a small percentage” of the 6.2 million pages of documents provided to the committee were “set aside because they raise executive branch confidentiality interests.”

In question are 9,400 documents that came to the committee’s attention in 2009, McClatchy has learned. It’s unclear whether the CIA first gave the committee staff access to the materials before the White House withheld them.But Obama hasn’t formally decreed that the documents are protected by executive privilege, McClatchy learned. Although the doctrine isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, the Supreme Court recognized in 1974 a limited power by the White House to withhold certain communications between high officials and close aides who advise and assist them.

A recent article written by this writer for Global Research posted last Saturday – “The Benghazi Scandal Is Obama’s Watergate But Worse” – was written in an effort to seek and uncover the truth. Accurate reporting on major world events is a challenge in today’s world where propaganda and disinformation are mainstream media norms and where virtually all major players in American politics simply lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths in constant effort to look good and cover up the truth. The American public knows this pathetic and sobering fact that deception has come to rule in the world of both politics and the media. People today neither believe their newscasters nor their political leaders. That is why examining the content of the tidal wave of assertions and opinions spewing forth from politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the latest Benghazi revelations must be taken with a grain of salt. Again, truth in today’s world is hard to come by. But as an investigative reporter, presenting a brief overview of recent comments and statements for any informed citizen to process and digest seems a worthwhile and important enterprise.

A timeline of recently unfolding events: On 10/12/12 exactly one month after the Benghazi incident, the legal conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the Benghazi attack on September 11th, 2012 that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparency in the criminal wake of the Bush regime, has proven to be anything but open and transparent. Having to sue the US government for access to the records, on April 18th, 2014, a full year and a half later, the Obama administration’s stonewalling ultimately failed and Judicial Watch successfully got hold of 41 State Department Benghazi related documents. Emails between high level White House officials discussing damage control strategies in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi assault were released last week. Jubilant Republicans are now calling one of those emails their “smoking gun,” believing it is so incriminating that it will do in their would-be opponent Hillary Clinton from potentially competing in the 2016 presidential election.

The newly declassified email written by Obama’s then Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically directed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice in preparation for her Sunday morning talk show appearances on September 16th, 2012 to explain the administration’s take on what it knew of the Benghazi murders. Rhodes advised Rice to attribute the Benghazi uprising as “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” pushing talking points designed to bolster Obama’s presidential image as a cool-as-a-cucumber-under-fire kind of wise and benevolent leader and statesman. The major emphasis of the email instructed Rice to blame the bogus anti-Moslem video as inciting a spontaneous protest like in other countries in the region that apparently grew violently out of control, of course all the while knowing that that was a boldface lie. This crucial piece of evidence proves that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both knew that the video did not cause the attack but that they chose to willfully deceive the American public in order to protect their own political careers and hence was born the infamously never ending Benghazi cover-up. Obama and Hillary withheld this damning email evidence even from the House Oversight Committee led by Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) requesting all documents pertaining to Benghazi more than a year ago. With the presidential election less than two months away at the time of the attack, Obama and Hillary were determined at all cost to keep hidden from Americans the real truth of criminal Benghazi activity they were guilty of engaging in during the months leading up to the attack. Last Thursday an angry Issa subpoenaed current Secretary of State John Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21st to further explain why those critical State Department records recently given to Judicial Watch were not among the 3200 documents originally handed over to his committee well over a year ago.

But a close look at the nature of the information Tsarnaev’s defense team has repeatedly requested from prosecutors in motions to the court suggests Tsarnaev’s lawyers are trying to pry loose something about the government’s relationship with the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing on April 15, 2013.The key to this relationship may lie in a store of information that the Russians delivered to U.S. investigators in the days after the bombing. Equally, it may be found in warnings Moscow delivered to U.S. investigators before the attack. Either way, the U.S. government has fought hard to keep the lid on what it knows.The defense team’s motive in asking for such information is clear enough: they are angling for anything that might convince jurors to spare their client’s life. But the government’s stonewalling raises serious questions about why it wants to keep secret what the Russians knew about the Tsarnaevs, and how and when this information reached the FBI and the CIA.

Already, Tsarnaev is facing an uphill battle because of a widespread presumption of his guilt—a presumption fed, in large part, by law enforcement leaks and an unquestioning media. The FBI has been waging an apparent war on witnesses, characterized by the scorched-earth tactic of intimidating, arresting, deporting, and, in one case, killing them. That has rendered them inaccessible to Tsarnaev’s defense.These hardball tactics appear to be just part of the government strategy of suppressing information in the case. The Justice Department’s trump card is the ability to withhold information based on national security claims. That is in addition to an overwhelming financial advantage.

The defense team has thus repeatedly had to ask U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. to compel the government to release information. That has eaten up a lot of time critical in preparing the defense case.Not that Tsarnaev has been given much of it. One statistic tells the story: Tsarnaev’s team has had about half of the preparation time that defense lawyers in federal death penalty cases have been granted over the past decade—18 months versus a median of 36. So the prospects for getting the whole story behind the bombing laid out in open court look bleak.

As the US debates expanding its campaign against the Islamic State beyond Iraq and Syria, the leading US civil liberties group is intensifying its efforts to force transparency about lethal US counterterrorism strikes and authorities. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will file a disclosure lawsuit for secret Obama administration documents specifying, among other things, the criteria for placement on the so-called “kill list” for drone strikes and other deadly force. Information sought by the ACLU includes long-secret analyses establishing the legal basis for what the administration terms its “targeted killing program” and the process by which the administration determines that civilians are unlikely to be killed before launching a strike, as well as verification mechanisms afterward to establish if the strike in fact has caused civilian deaths.

“Over the last few years, the US government has used armed drones to kill thousands of people, including hundreds of civilians. The public should know who the government is killing, and why it’s killing them,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU, told the Guardian.

The ACLU suit proceeds after the Obama administration disclosed none of the lethal counterterrorism documentation through a Freedom of Information Act request the civil liberties group launched in October 2013. According to the new lawsuit, the departments of state, justice and defense, as well as the CIA, have stonewalled the ACLU’s requests for nearly 18 months. Recent legal history suggests the ACLU is in for an uphill court struggle. The Obama administration, which has called itself the most transparent in history, has thus far repelled or delayed ACLU lawsuits for disclosure around drone strikes and the 2011 assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and al-Qaida propagandist. Additionally, the administration is fighting the ACLU on the legality of its bulk surveillance activities and to prevent the release of thousands of graphic photographs detailing Bush-era torture by the CIA and military. Yet the administration has seen the courts chip away at its blanket denials of documents sought by the ACLU. Most of the intelligence community’s disclosures of surveillance memos since Edward Snowden’s revelations have followed the administration’s courtroom losses to the ACLU and other civil-liberties groups. In June, the second circuit court of appeals forced the Department of Justice to release much of a critical 2010 memo blessing the killing of Awlaki. (The ACLU is seeking the release of 10 more major intelligence memos related to targeted killing.)

Last month, 9/11 parents Loreen and Matt Sellitto hosted an informative event focused on one of the most important yet least-understood aspects of September 11: the extent to which the terrorists received support from foreign governments—and the extent of the government’s knowledge of that support, both before and after the attacks.

Held in Naples, Florida, the November 11 event was called “The Untold Story of 9/11: A Conversation with Bob Graham.” Following opening remarks from host Loreen Sellitto and from Terry Strada of 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism, the event featured three speakers: Former Senator Bob Graham, the most prominent voice outside government fighting for declassification of the 28 pages. Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen, who broke the story of the FBI’s discovery of a 9/11 cell in Sarasota, and who continues working to bring FBI investigation documents into the daylight. Attorney Tom Julin, who is helping the Broward Bulldog in its effort to overcome the government’s stonewalling. Here, we cover many of the highlights; a full video of the event can be found at the bottom of the page.

Broward Bulldog Battles Feds Over Sarasota Investigation Christensen’s quest for answers about foreign sources of support of the 9/11 hijackers began in 2011 with a tip passed to him by Anthony Summers, who, with his wife Robbyn Swan, had just completed their book, “The Eleventh Day.” Summers and Swan had learned about an FBI investigation of a Saudi family with close ties to the Saudi government that suddenly abandoned its upscale home just outside Sarasota about two weeks before 9/11. Pursuing the lead, Christensen contacted Senator Graham for his insights into the Sarasota cell. Braced for the possibility that Graham would decline comment because of classification restraints, Christensen was stunned to learn that Graham—who had been chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11—was unable to comment for an altogether different reason: Graham said the FBI had never told him about its Sarasota investigation.