April 5 marked the 32nd anniversary of former Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain’s death, supposedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. This past year, an unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists that put fresh eyes on Cobain’s autopsy and the crime scene material concluded that Cobain’s death actually resulted from...
Abigail Spanberger follows the model of the CIA throughout the developing world In late May, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger vetoed collective bargaining rights legislation— Senate Bill 378 and House Bill 1264—that would have allowed half a million Virginia public workers to organize into unions and be able to negotiate their...
In August 2022, Ukrainian security service (SBU) operatives hid explosives in a crate intended for a cat in a car driven by a woman and her twelve year old daughter. After the car passed through the Russian border, the SBU planted the bomb in the SUV of Russian journalist...
In a February 1985 episode of the hit NBC television series Miami Vice, Eagles singer Glenn Frey played a swashbuckling CIA pilot, Jimmy Cole, who flies ace detective Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Rafael Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) to Colombia to conduct a drug deal. Crockett and Tubbs had been...
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...
Vance’s top funder, Peter Thiel, co-founded the data-analytics company Palantir, which has the CIA as a client, and was an early investor in Facebook, the CIA’s “wet dream.” Surging in the polls after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump boosted his prospects of becoming the next president by nominating J....
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.
Following the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed an indictment alleging that Maduro “moved loads of cocaine under the protection of Venezuelan law enforcement” and that profits from the illegal activity “flowed” to...
New Documentary Explores Life and Legacy of Fletcher Prouty, who wrote about CIA covert operations in his classic book The Secret Team In a famous scene in Oliver Stone’s epic 1992 film JFK, Kevin Costner’s character confers with a shadowy CIA operative played by Donald Sutherland known as Mr. X...
After Rodriguez ordered Che be shot, his hands were chopped off and shipped to Langley, but not before he stole the Rolex from Che’s corpse that was meant for the son of one of his compatriots in Bolivia On September 16, 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis awarded the Governor’s Medal...