On September 18th 1947, the main provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 went into effect. One of these was the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most infamous part of the US national security state. While we pay a lot of attention these days to digital surveillance and the agencies that focus on signals intelligence like the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance office, the CIA has and continues to play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining global US hegemony via human intelligence as well as through its covert actions, including coups, terrorism and sabotage...
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...
Billy Waugh Says He Wrote Recommendation to Drop Them on Mu Gia Pass Along Ho Chi Minh Trail on the North Vietnam-Laos Border
He and other Special Forces operatives planned to parachute a nuclear device into area behind enemy lines and then detonate it
Told General Vo Nguyen Giap’s son in...
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...
James B. Wells is a retired criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University who was nine years old on September 27, 1965, when he received the terrible news that his father Jack had died in a small plane crash in Bao Tri, some ten kilometers southwest of Cu Chi,...
Current CIA director Gina Haspel described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, according to declassified CIA cables – most of which she wrote...
In early September, Dr. Thomas Alter II—author of the well-regarded book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022)—was fired from his tenured position teaching history at Texas State University after he gave an online talk at a socialist conference.
Alter’s...
Part I in a two-part series
In December, the rapid fall of the Syrian government to Western-backed jihadists stunned the world and sparked a wide range of reactions amid the fallout. Unsurprisingly, the collective West was quick to celebrate the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, a long-time U.S. foreign policy objective...
The CIA likes to fashion itself as a heroic agency that helps to protect national security and uphold democracy around the world.
However, Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 2024), shows that the CIA draws directly from British and French colonial precedents, and adopts the same...
In this episode, we highlight the struggle of the workers at the Ford Cuautitlán Assembly Plant, just outside Mexico City. On January 8, 1990, workers at the plant were attacked by police and private hired thugs wearing Ford jackets. This happened during a prolonged period of labor action by the workers, and kicked off an occupation of the plant. This attack didn’t happen in a vacuum and the CIA played a role in squashing labor at the plant.
