Category: Secrecy

Reagan’s Bargain/Charlie Wilson’s War

From the Archive: At the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, we are re-publishing two articles by Washington insiders, CIA analyst Peter W. Dickson and lobbyist Bruce P. Cameron. Both issued unheeded warnings about the looming catastrophe — Dickson while at the CIA…

Why Afghanistan Really Fell Apart

From the Archive: A mythology has long surrounded why America got into its 10-year-long Afghan war, based on the false premise that Washington’s big mistake was abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviets departed in 1989. The reality was quite different, as foreign…

The Slippery Slope of Assassinations

With the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and al-Qaeda associate based in Yemen, the Obama administration has stepped onto a slippery slope where loosening standards for extrajudicial killings could slide into a terrifying use of government power, the…

Enduring Terror Double Standards

Exclusive: President Barack Obama ordered the targeted killing of al-Qaeda figure and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki despite the lack of any legal due process. But the same week, the U.S. government continued to turn a blind eye to a Cuban-American…

Taking a Bush Secret to the Grave

Special Report: The National Archives has approved an appeal by journalist Robert Parry seeking release of a 30-year-old secret, the address where George H.W. Bush supposedly went on an October weekend in 1980 — when several witnesses put Bush in…

Inside US Counterinsurgency

From the Archive: Stan Goff, the ex-U.S. Special Forces soldier who helped Pat Tillman’s family expose the Army’s cover-up of the former NFL star’s friendly fire death in Afghanistan, wrote this story about his own military experience. It was published at…

On Libya, Now They Tell Us

Exclusive: The Washington Post now admits that the key role of Islamists in Libya’s uprising “went largely unnoticed” before Muammar Gaddafi was toppled last month. But Robert Parry asks whose fault was that, since it was the Post and other…

Chronicling America’s 9/11 Descent

The terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, sent the United States into a 10-year downward spiral, not because of the attacks themselves but because of disastrous political judgments that followed. In recognition of the tenth anniversary, we have compiled six articles by…

The Belated Wisdom of Ex-Leaders

Departing political leaders offer two kinds of reflections: self-serving rationalizations by those still protecting their reputations and blunt truth-telling by people who realize they should have done more when they had the chance. Both are galling, though in different ways,…

Bird-Dogging Torturers in NYC

Exclusive: As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, many ex-Bush administration officials who approved torture in the “war on terror” and botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are back in the spotlight taking bows from appreciative audiences in tightly controlled settings. But…