Any encouragement that torture opponents may take from an initial step toward releasing part of a long Senate report on CIA abuses during the Bush-43 years is tempered by the fact that the declassification process may be glacially slow and…
U.S. officials lecture others about respecting international law and punishing human rights crimes, but those principles are ignored when the violators are U.S. officials. Offenders like ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even get honors, as Coleen Rowley and Todd E. Pierce…
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.
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…
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…
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.
Exclusive: The U.S. government’s use of targeted killings on al-Qaeda-linked “terrorists” has stirred legal and moral objections. But what about using drones to assassinate Latin American peasants fighting a corrupt oligarchy? That issue has emerged in Colombia’s long guerrilla war, Andrés Cala…
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…
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,…
Exclusive: Senior U.S. intelligence analysts disagreed with the Obama administration’s certainty that the Syrian government was behind the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack, but that dissent was suppressed amid the rush to a near war, reports Robert Parry.