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...
The name Allard Lowenstein (1929-1980) may not mean too much to political activists today, but in the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known liberal figure associated with many of the progressive causes of the day.
For this reason, it would come as something of a shock to many of...
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...
The CIA rivals the Vatican in covering up sex crimes against children and then protecting the members of its organization who commit them
Buzzfeed reported early this month that, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the CIA revealed that 10 employees and a contractor had committed sex crimes against children—but only one was ever...
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...
Elbridge Colby, President Donald Trump’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the man running the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is the grandson of Nixon’s CIA Director William Colby, son of Jonathan Colby, a manager of the Carlyle Group, and nephew of Carl Colby, alleged to...
The March 8, 2026, issue of The New York Times Magazine featured an article by Matthieu Aikins and Wesley Morgan entitled “America’ Secret Veterans: They Fought For the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Now, 10,000 Former Zero Unit Soldiers Are in the United States and Living in Fear.”
The article focused on...
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,...
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...
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...
