CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t In a recent feature article in The New Yorker magazine, writer Amy Davidson Sorkin recalls the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1995 bill, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan had...
Less than a year after the United States and the U.S.-backed Organization of American States (OAS) supported a violent military coup to overthrow the government of Bolivia, the Bolivian people have reelected the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and restored it to power. In the long history of U.S.-backed “regime changes”...
By now you have probably been told innumerable times by friends, colleagues and progressive commentators why holding your nose and voting for Joe Biden is absolutely necessary to save America from four more destructive years of Donald Trump. I agree with all those voices. And I endorse all their reasons—which...
Even when the U.S. and Israel fired missiles and dropped bombs on the home of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his wife and other members of his family, killing more than 40 members of the leadership of Iran, senior Iranian officials had maintained that Iran would never develop...
The mandate to end war in Ukraine is written clearly and decisively in our founding document, the Constitution of the United States. Article IV, Section 4 requires that “The United States…shall protect each of them against invasion.” Fomenting war in Ukraine runs counter to that mandated obligation. In fact,...
The weekend of December 10-11, 2021, saw a reported 30 tornadoes hitting several states from Arkansas to Illinois; as of this writing, 74 people are confirmed dead and several buildings severely damaged or totally demolished. All the cases of death and destruction are devastating; however, the most telling and unconscionable...
Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group, including its national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with seditious conspiracy for plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s election win over Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. While this is certainly a move in the right direction,...
Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications. This...
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately for a new book I’m writing that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence or the CIA, and I stumbled upon the biography of Frank Mankiewicz, the former Robert F. Kennedy speechwriter, who apparently had been a “secret backchannel” between President...
A recent video portrays real-life clashes between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators at events in California. As demonstrators yelled, damaged and stole signs and banners, and chased one another, it all seemed somewhat absurd. But it also showed the sincerity of people, willing to stand outside in the extremely hot weather in...