With the confirmation of Gina Haspel as CIA director, there’s rightfully great interest in her record regarding torture. Contrary to the rhetoric--and with barely a word about the utility of torture in rigging the case for the Iraq invasion--the actual ends of torture are incredibly worse than the gruesome means. Of course, there...
Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst who served with the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury and as an aide to U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). He has just published a thoughtful book, Our Country Then and Now, which provides a sweeping economic history of...
We, allied anti-imperialist organizations and individuals across the world, condemn the rightwing coup against indigenous president Evo Morales that forced him and other members of the Bolivian government to resign. This coup is being undertaken to inflict the worst kind of violence upon class-conscious, indigenous revolutionaries who, under...
In early 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and other select members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which favored close integration with the U.S during the Cold War. According to historian Michael Schaller, between 1958 and 1960...
Danny Casolaro Was Planning to Meet with Key Figures in Nugan Hand Bank and Members of Australian Government Commission Before He Was Murdered On August 10, 1991, Danny Casolaro was found lying dead in a tub of bloody water in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia. 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...
Part 6 in our Biden Series: A Company Man? On May 9, 1981, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism was debating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (S. 391). Their goal: criminalize the unauthorized identification of U.S. intelligence agents. Then-Senator Joe Biden rose to his feet to denounce my...
For over two years we have been told Putin’s Russia has interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. We now find the U.S. government has decided it can unilaterally invalidate the actual presidential elections in Venezuela and recognize a person of its choosing as president. This is one more...
The effects of this poisonous coup attempt—cooked up at Langley more than 30 years ago—had lingering consequences which exacerbated income equality, stifled economic growth and undercut human rights. Back in the 1980s New Zealand registered in the global consciousness because of its then-Prime Minister, the late David Lange, and his...
On May 26, The New York Times Magazine ran a feature story by Matthieu Aikins entitled “America’s Monster: Uncovering the Brutal Career of Abdul Raziq—And the Hidden Truths of the War in Afghanistan.” The story detailed the U.S. military and CIA’s support for Abdul Raziq, a police commander in Spin...