But instead, he pandered to the CIA’s leadership and to the politicians who put them there. A friend from Covert Action Magazine recently sent me a video of former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo giving an interview upon his retirement from the CIA. The interview is seven years old....
UK government shamefully cooperated with U.S. in torture of al-Qaeda suspects We Americans have had a painful and difficult national debate over the past 20 years relative to torture. Torture was official U.S. government policy from 2002 until at least 2005, and that iteration was not formally outlawed until passage...
During the Vietnam War era, peace activists compared American war planners like Robert S. McNamara and Henry Kissinger to Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of War Production and Armaments who stood out for his lack of ideological zeal in supporting the Nazi cause. What motivated Speer, rather, was a cold...
In this extraordinary fifth installment of "Live on the Fly - Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom," Randy Credico speaks with Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture and professor at Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights; Lauri Love, who successfully avoided extradition to the U.S.; and...
Heidi Boghosian: In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which led to the formation of the National Security Council and, under its direction, the CIA. Its original mandate was to collect and analyze strategic information for use in war. Though shrouded in secrecy, many CIA activities such as...
Randy Credico: Welcome Pamela Anderson. It's been two years since you were last on the Free Assange Series with me and Dennis. When we talked back then, you brought in something that most people —with the exception of his mother: the real, human side of Julian Assange. People know...
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...
Louis Wolf:  Our first question relates to Gina Haspel. I should just point out that we have just posted on our webpage the transcripts of the torture documents which were obtained by the Federation of American Scientists... Chris Agee:  And the National Security Archive, right? Louis Wolf:  ...and the National Security Archive...in which...
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who currently serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, faced confrontation from several Democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary committee during his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court of a week ago. The Senate Judiciary committee questioned him about the accusation...
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...