The United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States was set up under President Gerald Ford in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. The commission was led by the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, and is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.
The commission was created in response to a December 1974 report in The New York Times that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. The commission issued a single report in 1975, touching upon certain CIA abuses including mail opening and surveillance of domestic dissident groups. It publicized Project MKULTRA, a CIA mind control study. It also studied issues relating to the John F. Kennedy assassination, specifically the head snap as seen in the Zapruder film (first shown on television in 1975), and the possible presence of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in Dallas, Texas.
A larger investigation, the Church Committee, was set up on 27 January 1975 by the U.S. Senate. The Nedzi Committee was created in the U.S. Congress on 19 February 1975. It was replaced by the Pike Committee five months later.
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, president, commission, cia and/or activities:
“The popular colleges of the United States are turning out more educated people with less originality and fewer geniuses than any other country.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as “right” in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as “brute force.””
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“[The reason a man has] so much trouble with the Senate is that there isn’t a man in the Senate who doesn’t think he is better suited to be President than the President, and thinks he might have been President except for luck.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939)
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
—Bible: New Testament John 8:32.
These words of Jesus are inscribed on the wall of the main lobby at the CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia.
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)