This failure resulted from previous FBI, CIA, and NSA protection for al-Qaeda members connected with the plot. Before examining the details of the 9/11 plot, it is worth noting the extent to which the CIA, FBI, and NSA have acted to protect members of al Qaeda in the past. The most relevant recent history begins with the 1987 founding of al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, a hub for U.S.-based mujahideen to travel to Afghanistan, and later Bosnia.

In 1975, former CIA agent Philip Agee delivered a bombshell with the publication of Inside the Company, an exposé of nefarious CIA activities in Latin America. Growing up in a conservative middle-class family in Tampa Bay, Florida, Agee had joined the CIA in 1957 after graduating from Notre Dame University...

William J. Burns’ appointment offers little more than an image makeover for the agency. As a diplomat, Burns supported U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and is now stoking the coals against Russia and China. William J. Burns was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the...

Ten U.S. presidents, 20 CIA directors, and 56 years of covert action screwed over Brazil’s poor and paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro Covid-19, murder, evangelical Christianity, crime, environmental destruction, drugs, shantytowns, inequality, corruption, doesn’t matter what you pick, Brazil is a world leader in them all—and...

Part 6 in our Biden Series: A Company Man? On May 9, 1981, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism was debating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (S. 391). Their goal: criminalize the unauthorized identification of U.S. intelligence agents. Then-Senator Joe Biden rose to his feet to denounce my...

Fifty-five years ago on this day, the fate of Africa was irrevocably altered when the CIA sponsored a 1966 coup d’état against Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, former Prime Minister of Ghana and Pan-Africanist visionary who was voted as “Africa’s Man of the Millennium.” At least 1,600 Ghanaians died in the coup...

Did the CIA lie, cheat and betray its friends and business partners in ways that even Donald Trump might envy? A rapidly unfolding intelligence scandal indicates that the answer is yes. The dark world of cyber-age espionage is on full display in the unfolding scandal involving the CIA and Crypto...

A new book reveals how U.S. Presidents of both parties unleashed the CIA in the Congo to do the dirty work of greedy corporations, causing misery, mutilations and massacres of such magnitude they dwarfed even the wildest accounts depicted in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. On June 30, 2020, 60...