Category: Intelligence

A History of False Fear

It’s always hard to get someone to speak honestly when his or her livelihood depends on not telling the truth. With the military-industrial-surveillance complex, that reality is multiplied by the billions of dollars and the many careers at stake, Joe…

Truman’s True Warning on the CIA

Exclusive: National security secrecy and a benighted sense of “what’s good for the country” can be a dangerous mix for democracy, empowering self-interested or misguided officials to supplant the people’s will, as President Truman warned and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern…

Snowden’s Leaks Doom NSA’s Snooping

After long claiming to welcome a robust debate on NSA surveillance, President Obama found the debate more robust and more substantive than he expected, especially after the leaks by Edward Snowden, as Danny Schechter explains.

NYT Replays Its Iraq Fiasco in Syria

Exclusive: Much like the Iraq WMD fiasco in 2002-03, the New York Times has taken sides in the conflict in Syria and is ignoring evidence that undercuts its indictment of the Assad regime as the guilty party in the Aug. 21 Sarin attack outside Damascus,…

Unjust Aftermath: Post-Noriega Panama

Special Report: Twenty-four years ago, the United States invaded Panama to capture Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. Operation Just Cause promised the country a new day free of dictatorship and drug-tainted corruption, but it didn’t work out that way,…

Contras, Dirty Money and CIA

From the Archive: On Dec. 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. The U.S. news media viewed the assault as a case of Bush seeking justice, but there…

WPost Slips Behind Amazon’s Cloud

Technology moguls many involved with high-tech U.S. intelligence projects are deploying their fortunes to buy up or start up media entities that give them control of the tone and content of journalism, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his Washington Post,…

Fresh Doubts about Syria’s Sarin Guilt

Exclusive: A new analysis, buried in a UN report, reveals that one of the two missiles at the center of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, which nearly led to a U.S. military attack, showed no evidence of Sarin, further undermining…

Obama’s Syria Strategy at a Crossroads

Exclusive: The Islamic Front’s capture of a U.S.-stocked supply depot in northern Syria prompted a suspension of those shipments to “moderate” Syrian rebels. The incident also drove home how Islamists are gaining ground — and why President Obama may shift U.S. strategy, writes Robert…

The Bigger Risk: Private v. Public Spying

The fear of NSA’s metadata collection is as much in the potential for Big Brother government as in the present or as Edward Snowden says a “turnkey tyranny” all ready to go but private-sector abuses are another worry, ex-CIA analyst Paul…