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 Perpetrators This list of perpetrators is not meant to be exhaustive, but it can help us begin a conversation that should lead to indictments for treason, in addition to other crimes. The harms these perpetrators are doing must be stopped. Survival is at stake. If COVID-19 was a laboratory-created disease...

Hope and Resolve

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In chaotic times like ours, it behooves us to practice proactive optimism, which is far more than infantile hope or pious faith. Conscious, vigorous optimism is visionary and builds on our awareness of our human identity and dignity. It expresses our faith in humanity, our resolve to be morally and...
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...
Numerologists tell you that 19 is 1 + 9 which equals the powerful # 1, or new beginnings. Well, 19 years ago on March 19, coincidentally, my nation orchestrated the most horrific deed since God knows when. The illegal and immoral attack, invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq really upset the world's...
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...
I had the great fortune recently of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians in Athens and with meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union has drafted, and will soon release, a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive...
History as usual provides a cautionary lesson On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping...
Some people on the left have been confused about what to do in November. So much so, that former members of Students for a Democratic Society felt compelled to write an open letter urging a vote for Biden against Trump. We agree. A Trump victory would further exacerbate inequality, sexism...
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...