The New York Times recently reported the CIA is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of documents, violating a 1998 law requiring full disclosure of classified records relating to Nazi war criminals. The CIA has already released 1.2 million pages of documents to the working group in charge of procurement, which show a closer relationship between Uncle Sam and the Nazis than previously understood.

The refusal is no surprise, for such documents could shatter the idealistic illusions about our government that most hold dear.

Conspiracy theorists have long known of U.S./Nazi collaboration as Operation Paperclip. Some of the best documentation comes from radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, a highly-respected columnist for The Nation magazine, as well as editor of Counterpunch.org.

In his 1998 book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, with Jeffrey St. Clair, Cockburn cites Alan Dulles’ plan to bring elite Nazis to the United States to aid our own research and intelligence efforts. Despite FDR’s objections, Harry Truman eventually approved the plan.

A book released by the working group in May, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, reveals Uncle Sam did work closely with many Nazi war criminals after World War II, including at least five associates of Adolf Eichmann, architect of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews.

American officials have defended the practice as crucial to gaining important intelligence about the Soviet Union and key scientific research, such as that of rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun.

Bringing over a few top scientists is one thing, but Cockburn indicates that hundreds of Nazi officers and collaborators were brought into the CIA! If true, it would mean that the CIA has been infiltrated by Nazi interests ever since.

Could this explain the ascension of the Bush crime family to the American throne? In 1942, George Dubya’s grandpappy Prescott Bush — an investment banker — was found in violation of The Trading with the Enemy Act. Uncle Sam seized several companies in which he had an interest, including Union Banking Corporation of New York, which was controlled by German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was an early financier of the Nazi party. Prescott wasn’t alone — companies such as Standard Oil and General Motors also had investments in pre-war Germany. The connections here just plain reek.

The Times quoted a CIA spokesman who said, “The CIA has not withheld any material identified in its files related to the commission of war crimes by officials, agents or collaborators of Nazi Germany.”

Read between the lines, dear reader — the key phrase is “any material identified.” Without perjuring themselves, the CIA admits it may be withholding such materials, but the working group just hasn’t asked for the right documents.

Ohio’s own Senator Mike DeWine — a sponsor of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act — will hold a public hearing on the matter soon, but don’t hold your breath. Getting the CIA to release documents admitting that Nazi war criminals were not only given safe haven by Uncle Sam but brought into the CIA hierarchy itself — not to mention the Bush connection — would be akin to the Air Force finally producing the files which document the extra-terrestrial saucer crash in Roswell, N.M. in 1947. More on that next week …

Greg Schwartz is a graduate student in journalism and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].