Mark Lane, JFK assassination expert, has died.

[Octafish]

41. Yes. CIA by law was limited to overseas operations, no domestic operations.

The CIA - at Home

excerpted from the book

The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies

by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976


p135
Responding to enormous pressure from President Johnson to uncover the foreign links to the growing unrest of the late 1960s, the CIA opened up a new division within its Counter-Intelligence Branch. Over the next seven years, the program conducted by this special staff, known as Operation CHAOS, spied on more than 7,000 American citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations.

This was the most extensive, but not the first, CIA spying operation against Americans. For years the agency had been opening mail, burglarizing homes, wiretapping phones, and secretly watching the movements of unsuspecting individuals within the United States, all in violation of its legislative charter.

In 1947, when Congress voted to create the CIA as part of the National Security Act, there was great concern about whether the CIA could operate in the United States and against Americans.

Congress wanted to assure the public that this agency would not lead to the growth of a secret police. Responding to these suspicions, Dr. Vannevar Bush, an administration witness, explained that the agency was concerned only with intelligence "outside this country," and not with "internal affairs. To make sure, Congress wrote into the ClA's charter that the agency was prohibited from exercising "police, subpoena, or law-enforcement powers or internal security functions." Congressional debate made it clear that Congress anticipated that the CIA would simply not operate at home.

Two years later, with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, congressional apprehensions were again calmed by the assertion that the CIA had no jurisdiction within the United States, that it "has no connection with the FBI; it is not under the FBI, it does not do the same kind of work as the FBI. These public assertions, however, did not coincide with the ClA's secret growth of operations within the United States and the surveillance of Americans abroad.

Because of the public uproar that would have ensued if the agency had openly expanded its domestic operations, the CIA wrote its own secret charter. Through internal directives, executive orders, and pacts with other government agencies, the CIA expanded its authority to operate at home so that it eventually encompassed activities that unquestionably violated the law, as well as its congressional charter.

From the beginning, CIA justified its involvement in domestic activities in terms of supplementing its covert operations and intelligence gathering abroad. As was discussed in Chapter Two in detail, the CIA created an intricate system of front organizations and companies to provide cover for its clandestine work. It set up its own airlines and business firms, and formed dummy foundations to funnel secret money into domestic student groups, educational publications, and labor unions. Recruiting its agents from almost every sector of the private domain, the CIA turned students, missionaries, and journalists into spies abroad. The agency also used its authority to protect its "sources and methods" to justify spying on Americans in the United States.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/CIA_Home_LS.html