Appointment of Abrams to Public Diplomacy Commission Shows President Biden’s Close Ties to the CIA
In September 1998, Desiree A. Ferdinand gave a sworn deposition, in a case filed with the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, detailing the career of her father, Colonel Albert V. Carone, an army intelligence officer...
In August 2025, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) ruled that the perennial lawsuit filed by the families of 9/11 victims against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) can finally proceed to trial.
The landmark decision renewed interest into the widely suspected Saudi role in...
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...
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...
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,...
Armenia is another battleground of the new cold war
In July 2022, CIA Director William Burns made a surprise visit to Yerevan in Armenia. He was there officially to support his Agency’s financing of “non-profit organizations” whose stated purpose is to “spread democratic values.”
The United States Agency for International Development...
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 the 1990 movie, Air America, Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr., play two Air America pilots who smuggle heroin while supporting U.S. proxies in the Vietnam War.
Air America was an airline run by the CIA previously called Civil Air Transport (CAT), which had been formed by General Claire...
Mike Pompeo, CIA Director and Secretary of State in the first Trump administration, has long been a Ukraine war hawk, calling Russia’s actions genocide, stating that Crimea should be returned to Ukraine (when its people voted overwhelmingly to be part of Russia) and consistently advocating for increased...
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...
