Peter Van Buren

December 13, 2014

No one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it. In a Galaxy Far, Far Away The United States sanctioned acts of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took place in secret prisons (“black sites”) […]

Todd E. Pierce

December 12, 2014

What do the NYPD arresting officers of Eric Garner, the CIA officials responsible for the crimes detailed in the Torture Report and US foreign policy officials all have in common? They are all agents of institutions that have adopted an “authoritarian psychology.” So what does authoritarian psychology mean? Alexandre Kojeve, a French fascist in Vichy […]

Jason Ditz

December 11, 2014

Does everyone remember when USAID created that “Cuban Twitter” and paid all those guys to start agitating for regime change on it? What if that wasn’t even the most ridiculous thing USAID was doing in Cuba at the time? Good news, it wasn’t! USAID also hired a bunch of Serbian music promoters and spent millions […]

Jim Lobe

December 10, 2014

Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups. While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive negotiations and sometimes furious […]

Dan Sanchez

December 9, 2014

A 1999 comic book examined humanitarian intervention and regime change, predicting the Iraq War catastrophe. Dictators are bad, therefore intervening to remove a dictator is good, right? For many Iraq War supporters it was as simple as that, and they derided opponents as apologists for Saddam Hussein. Even now that the War has become a […]

Nathaniel Eisen

December 7, 2014

Early in Citizenfour – journalist Laura Poitras’ new film about whistleblower Edward Snowden – Snowden explains his internal struggle over whether to out himself as the source of the evidence for broad NSA spying on American citizens. Snowden thinks it’s much more powerful for someone to openly leak information about wrongdoing than to do so […]

Charles Goyette

December 3, 2014

Even though the U.S. has been warring in Iraq for 24 years now, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says the war there and in Syria against ISIS could go another four years. That is a wildly arbitrary guess since so far, the longer we have been at war in the region the more the […]

Jason Ditz

December 1, 2014

Sony Pictures went through a nasty hacking attack this past week. It ground the studio to a halt for awhile, and also led to the leaks of some upcoming movies. So whodunnit? Believe it or not, it sounds like it was North Korea. Sony speculated that North Korea was behind the attack, and North Korea […]

Jason Ditz

December 1, 2014

The village of Oakley, Michigan is easy to miss, even when you’re driving through it. There’s one stop light, and on either side are a gas station and a tavern/restaurant. 290 people call it home. It’s also the home of one of the most bizarre secret police organizations in the United States. Tiny little Oakley […]

Medea Benjamin

November 24, 2014

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was supposed to steer the Pentagon away from a decade of war, including bringing US troops home from Afghanistan and paving the way for a reduction in the Pentagon budget. Instead, the Obama administration has opted for remaining in Afghanistan, continuing the disastrous drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen, and […]