Nearly 13 years after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released the video Collateral Murder exposing the brutal and intentional killing of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists, over 150 people packed the same room in the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. for the Belmarsh Tribunal. January 20th’s sitting was...
Laura Martinez was living an idyllic life in an upscale San Antonio suburb with her common-law husband Charlie Thrash, 78, when, on March 6, 2019, Charlie was taken by police from their home and placed in an assisted living facility. Charlie was declared to be incapacitated and placed under guardianship...
I have made more than several trips to Iceland over the past several months. I genuinely love the place. The population is small, highly educated, friendly, and welcoming to outsiders. I have been consistently surprised at the number of Syrian, Kurdish and Ukrainian refugees that I have met, all...
CovertAction Magazine co-founder Philip Agee was one of the best known whistleblowers of the 1970s, writing a tell-all book exposing CIA crimes and the influence of multi-national corporations in driving illegal covert operations. After the book’s publication, Agee was retaliated against by the CIA, which forced him to live the...
Being an FBI agent was Stephen Friend’s dream job. For eight and a half years working there, the Notre Dame graduate and Iraq War veteran investigated around 200 violent crimes, including human and sex-trafficking cases, and served five years as part of an FBI SWAT team. Friend did his job...
In this special episode of CovertAction Bulletin, we spend the entire hour with former CIA analyst and field agent John Kiriakou. Kiriakou became a whistleblower when he exposed the CIA’s official torture program—and then became the only person jailed for it. We discuss how the ongoing campaign against Julian Assange should inform us about how to view and support the work of other whistleblowers. While Assange remains in prison and under threat of extradition and trial in the U.S., the threat to journalists, publishers and activists continues to grow.
Resignations from the U.S. war on Vietnam, to the U.S. war on Iraq, to the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza In the November 21, 2024, weekly newsletter of the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training  (ADST), the editors included a 1995 oral history interview with William Watts, White...
Former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou says that “the deck has been stacked against whistleblowers” because of their prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act, which defines them as national traitors...
In a new CovertAction webinar famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg slams the author of new book alleging that Agee was a traitor when, ironically, everything in the book virtually screams out the opposite.
Bradley Birkenfeld, who exposed one of the largest tax scams in U.S. history, should also be pardoned On February 20, 2025, Donald Trump created the new position of the “Pardon Czar” to recommend “executive clemency” candidates, naming Alice Marie Johnson to that role. Johnson had been sentenced to life imprisonment without...