More than five years into his presidency, Barack Obama has yet to undertake a major reform of U.S. intelligence, even letting CIA Director John Brennan, who was implicated in Bush-Cheney abuses, block reports on those offenses. That must change, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.
Exclusive: President Obama has stumbled into a constitutional firefight between the CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee over the spy agency’s attempted cover-up of its Bush-era torture practices, a clash he could have averted by wielding a declassification stamp, reports Robert Parry.
President Obama has stumbled into a scandal created by his determination to protect dirty secrets on torture and other CIA crimes committed by the Bush-43 administration. The unlikely “whistleblower” is another Democratic defender of CIA abuses, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, notes Norman…
Across the Western world, there has been a clamping down on meaningful dissent, including secret information that is withheld from the public in the name of national security. And there has been a failure to contest this assault on democracy,…
Special Report: The Ukrainian crisis partly fomented by U.S. neocons including holdovers at the State Department has soured U.S-Russian relations and disrupted President Obama’s secretive cooperation with Russian President Putin to resolve crises in the Mideast, reports Robert Parry.
A fear about the U.S. “surveillance state” has been that it might merge with private tech companies that already collect vast amounts of data on private citizens, a nightmarish scenario that has become more plausible with Amazon’s collaboration with the CIA, writes Norman…
Key aspects of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 “war on terror” are finally winding down: U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan, but the troubling issue of lethal drones remains and it is time for Congress to set new…
The entangling threads connecting technology, media and the surveillance state have snarled so completely that it’s next to impossible to untie them, exemplified by Amazon, the Washington Post, and the CIA’s pending assassination of a suspected American terrorist, as Norman Solomon explains.
Feb. 11 marks two important anniversaries in the Middle East: the ouster of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. But the question remains whether the U.S. has learned the right…
Despite the declining threat that international terrorism poses to the U.S. homeland, the U.S. government continues to pour countless billions of dollars into counter-terrorism while impinging on constitutional liberties and misleading the public, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes.