John Glaser

October 15, 2013

Perpetual NSA cheerleader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday arguing that if we had had the NSA spying program prior to the 9/11 attacks, “we would have detected the impending attack that killed 3,000 Americans.” Therefore, systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment as a matter of policy is justified. Well, I’m […]

John Glaser

October 15, 2013

The cynic in me tried to temper the thrill I felt when the early chapter of U.S.-Iran rapprochement reached its apex last month with the historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The leadership of these two belligerents finally seemed to simultaneously entertain peaceful resolution to their disputes. Today, Iran presented […]

Ray McGovern

October 15, 2013

I’ve had a couple of days to reflect after arriving back from Moscow where my whistleblower colleagues Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake and I formally presented former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with the annual Sam Adams Associates award for integrity in intelligence. The thought that companioned me the entire time was the […]

John Glaser

October 15, 2013

How much does Barack Obama love the defense corporations? Of course, we know what candidate and President Obama says about the influence of lobbyists in Washington. “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over,” he said in 2007. “They will not run […]

John Glaser

October 13, 2013

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie weighed in on a government shutdown debate hosted at the New York Times called “What Federal Spending Are We Better Off Without?” Here’s an important passage: The U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global expenditures on military might and, in real dollars, our defense spending rose nearly 80 percent between 2001 and 2012. As the shutdown […]

Angela Keaton

October 11, 2013

From RT: The first videos of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have surfaced since he received asylum in Russia. The footage, provided by WikiLeaks, was taken during the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awards ceremony. The video fragments of a meeting, attended by the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former NSA executive Thomas Andrews […]

John Glaser

October 10, 2013

Yesterday I attended a great conference at the Cato Institute on the NSA’s surveillance programs. I wrote a short piece on it at The Washington Times that you can check out here. One thing I didn’t include in the piece, because I couldn’t write fast enough to get the direct quotes, was the incredible anecdote […]

John Glaser

October 10, 2013

Back when the Egyptian military ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamad Morsi, the Obama administration deflected calls to cut off aid, as is required by law in the event of a military coup. And as the months passed and the military regime imposed emergency law, censored the media, and marginalized opposition political parties, […]

Lucy Steigerwald

October 9, 2013

It must be strange to be Chelsea Manning. The former Army Private (previously known as Bradley Manning) did a very decisive thing by leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks. In spite of some initial suggestions that she did this in some apolitical — possibly mentally ill — fashion (Ann Coulter’s particularly asshole-ish summation was that […]

Clark Ruper

October 8, 2013

The prompt for a recent Atlantic Community call for articles on utilizing drones for military purposes asks “When do we have to start considering human rights violations and what the consequences of that might be?” As an American whose government has been a pioneer in deploying drones offensively in war zones, that question is of […]