5 August 2020 — Black Agenda Report
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
When it comes to China, Democracy Now, Jacobin, The Nation and others on the imperial-minded US ‘left” are allies of white supremacy.
“The racism that undergirds the New Cold War against China is nothing new.”
11 April 2014 — The Rancid Honeytrap
Last week the Associated Press reported that USAID — which provides billions in taxpayer cash for overseas “humanitarian” aid programs — created a Twitter-like platform in Cuba as a step toward fomenting a youth revolt against that country’s government. The way three ostensibly lefty journos, Mark Ames, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald responded to this is quite interesting and revealing.
7 November 2013 — Democracy Now!
A new report says medical professionals working under U.S. military orders have been complicit in the abuse of terrorism suspects. The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism concluded that medical staff who worked with the CIA and Pentagon “designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees” at Guantánamo Bay and at secret prisons overseas. Continue reading
14 October 2013 — Democracy Now!
In a Democracy Now! special, we spend the hour with four former U.S. intelligence officials — all whistleblowers themselves — who have just returned from visiting National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Russia. They are former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake, and former U.S. Justice Department ethics adviser Jesselyn Radack, now of the Government Accountability Project. Continue reading
14 October 2013 — Democracy Now!
In a Democracy Now! special, we spend the hour with four former U.S. intelligence officials — all whistleblowers themselves — who have just returned from visiting National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Russia. They are former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake, and former U.S. Justice Department ethics adviser Jesselyn Radack, now of the Government Accountability Project. Continue reading
23 August 2013
Over the past three days, since the story first broke, the BBC’s news Website (I use the word news advisedly) has carried twelve stories on the alleged chemical weapons attack that took place in a suburb of Damascus. Today’s offerings include, Hague believes Assad behind attack (23/8/13), without offering a shred of proof that the Assad government is behind the alleged attack or even that it took place, takes foreign secretary Hague’s ‘belief’ as a given. The lead paragraph tells it all: Continue reading
20 August 2013 — FAIR Blog
On August 15 Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild was arrested at the Wisconsin state capitol building in Wisconsin for the act of reporting on the arrest of a protestor. As he told Democracy Now! (8/19/13):
I get out my iPhone and take pictures. I was doing that, and then they were moving Bonnie Block out down a hallway toward an elevator—this is in the Capitol, a public space—and I was following them down there, and I was taking pictures. Continue reading
12 August 2013 — FAIR Blog
A headline is sometimes worth a thousand words, and this was definitely the case after a deadly drone strike occurred in Yemen last week.
“Drone Strike Kills Six Suspected Militants in Yemen,” a Reutersheadline (8/7/13) declared. “More Suspected Al-Qaeda Militants Killed as Drone Strikes Intensify in Yemen,” aCNN.com headline (8/8/13) offered. Whatever the language, one message was clear: “Suspected terrorists” or “militants” had been killed.
5 August 2013 — Democracy Now!
The Obama administration has announced it will keep 19 diplomatic posts in North Africa and the Middle East closed for up to a week, due to fears of a possible militant threat. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close the embassies was based on information collected by the National Security Agency. “If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys,” Chambliss said, in a direct reference to increasing debate over widespread spying of all Americans revealed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. (inc. transcript)
24 July 2013 — Democracy Now!
Forty-one years ago, Beacon Press lost a Supreme Court case brought against it by the U.S. government for publishing the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers. It is now well known how The New York Times first published excerpts of the top-secret documents in June 1971, but less well known is how the Beacon Press, a small nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association, came to publish the complete 7,000 pages that exposed the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
21 July 2013 — Information Clearing House
During a recent interview on Democracy Now, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001.i The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent,ii which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.
16 July 2013 — Democracy Now!
The judge in the Bradley Manning case says she will decide Thursday on his lawyers’ request to dismiss seven of the charges he faces, including allegations that he aided the enemy when he provided hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Continue reading
11 July 2013 — Democracy Now!
Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. Continue reading
9 July 2013 — FAIR Blog
Walter Pincus
To Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus (7/9/13), something about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden just doesn’t smell right. Lucky for him he gets space in a prestigious newspaper to work out his hunch–apparently without any editors or factcheckers to get in his way.
8 July 2013 — Democracy Now!
Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have opened the door to granting asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in a standoff with the United States. The offers came after a plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Austria after France and Portugal barred it from their airspace over false suspicions that Snowden was on board. The United States has refused to confirm or deny whether it was responsible. We discuss the latest with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA surveillance story based on Snowden’s leaks last month. Continue reading
17 June 2013 — Democracy Now!
Journalist Laura Poitras is being described as the connection between the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the reporters for The Guardian and The Washington Post who published his leaked documents about government surveillance. Poitras shared a byline on two of the key articles about the ongoing NSA revelations, and filmed the Guardian interview in Hong Kong in which Snowden went public with his identity. But well before she took on Snowden’s case, Poitras has come face to face with issues of privacy and state surveillance over her work as a documentary filmmaker. Continue reading
14 June 2013 — Democracy Now!
As the U.S. vows to take “all necessary steps” to pursue whistleblower Edward Snowden, James Bamford joins us to discuss the National Security Agency’s secret expansion of government surveillance and cyberwarfare. In his latest reporting for Wired magazine, Bamford profiles NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and connects the dots on PRISM, phone surveillance and the NSA’s massive spy center in Bluffdale, Utah. Says Bamford of Alexander: “Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign or the depth of his secrecy.” The author of “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” Bamford has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades, after helping expose its existence in the 1980s (inc. transcript).
10 June 2013 — Democracy Now!
As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warns the recent leaks could “render great damage to our intelligence capabilities,” we speak to William Binney, a former top official at the National Security Agency, and Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has broken the NSA spying stories. Binney spent almost 40 years at the agency but resigned after Sept. 11 over concerns about growing domestic surveillance. He spent time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. “The government is not trying to protect [secrets about NSA surveillance] from the terrorists,” Binney says. “It’s trying to protect knowledge of that program from the citizens of the United States.” Continue reading
7 June 2013 — Democracy Now!
From drone strikes to the massacre at al-Majalah, secret U.S. military actions inside Yemen are exposed in “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” the new documentary film by Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley opening today. Scahill’s book by the same name was published in April. We continue our conversation on Yemen with Scahill and two key Yemenis profiled in the film: Nasser al-Awlaki, who lost his son, cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and 16-year-old grandson to U.S. drone strikes; and Saleh bin Fareed, the Yemeni sheikh and tribal leader who was one of the first people to arrive at the site of the U.S. attack of al-Majalah that killed 45 civilians in 2009 (inc. transcript).
7 June 2013 — Democracy Now!
The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top-secret program, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs.
The New Dark Age 