It’s been sixteen years since Gul Rahman died of hypothermia, beaten and left half-naked and short shackled to a bare prison floor at the CIA-run Salt Pit “black site” prison in Afghanistan. It is not known what the CIA did to his corpse. His body was never turned over to his family.
According to...
Like the proverbial cat, some concepts have several lives. Or, like the mythological phoenix, they can be reborn from the ashes. This is certainly the case of the Intermarium, a geopolitical concept that envisaged an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea over the Black Sea to the...
Dusko Doder’s case has ominous reverberations in the era of Cold War 2.0
Late one February night in 1984, Dusko Doder, The Washington Post’s Soviet correspondent, noticed hundreds of lights blazing at the Soviet Defense Ministry and KGB offices in Moscow.
He surmised that the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, who had...
Between 1975 and 1989, the primary U.S. intelligence agency leveraged various financial assistance programs to shape Portuguese democracy and prevent the country from falling under Soviet influence. Here’s how.
The involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Portugal is widely acknowledged. In fact, it was primarily thanks to...
Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at...
On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today,...
Investigating a possible link between the cold murder cases in the Antelope Valley of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jonathan Aujay
Sprawling poppy fields, aerospace, and secret military bases, California’s Antelope Valley is known for these landmarks. Over the past decades, the Antelope Valley became...
I had the great fortune recently of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians in Athens and with meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union has drafted, and will soon release, a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive...
We can all agree that U.S. foreign policy must be changed and that to achieve that the mind—not to mention the heart and soul—of the American public must be changed. But what do you think is the main barrier to achieving such a change in the American mind? ...
Ramparts magazine was a beacon of the 1960s social movements: an anti-establishment muckraking magazine that published important exposés of the CIA, including its involvement in the murder of Ché Guevara, its infiltration of the National Student Association (NSA), and its support for clandestine police training programs in South Vietnam...
