Meteor Blades raises the obvious question over at Kos’ place:
Whatever details may be gleaned from those documents regarding long-known secrets about long-ago events exposed in nine volumes by the [Senator Frank] Church Committee in 1975, what most of us would really like to know is what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing illegally now that will provide for an “embarrassing” document release a quarter- or half-century from now.
The past is always used to absolve the present. Revealing the truth about illegalities long past is a way of implicitly stating that “thing are different now!” But of course they’re not, and in another thirty years the same scenario will be replayed. “THEY were kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons to be tortured–but things are different NOW!”