[This piece was first published in Counterpunch, Dec. 4, 2019. I’m republishing it for Black History Month 2021] Fifty one years ago, a squad of Chicago police officers killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a pre-dawn raid on the apartment where they were sleeping. In the decades since, a revealing body...
Category: United States
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With NSA Training, UAE Spies Monitored Rights Activists and Michelle Obama
From a New York Times story and additional reporting by Al Jazeera: Known as Project Raven, hackers employed state-of-the-art cyber-espionage tools to help the UAE engage in surveillance of other governments, armed groups, and human rights activists critical of the monarchy. Interviews by Reuters news agency in 2019 with former Raven operatives, along with a...
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The Unsolved Mystery of the ‘Havana Syndrome’
The non-profit National Security Archive in Washington has the latest on a mysterious malady that felled two CIA operatives in Cuba and many others. Is it a secret weapon, perhaps developed by the Russians, targeting U.S. intelligence operatives and diplomat? There’s no evidence that. But it’s not clear what could be causing similar symptoms among...
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Israel Threatens War to Block Biden’s Iran Diplomacy
It is clear that President Biden wants to rejoin the international nuclear agreement with Iran. President Obama negotiated the pact and Biden regards it as a key part of the Obama legacy. President Trump trashed the agreement with support of Israel. Now Israel is seeking to sustain Trump’s policy. The Israelis, in league with Mohammed bin...
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MI6 and CIA Are Recruiting: Diversity and Disabilities Welcome
The glamorization of intelligence work began with Ian Fleming’s James Bond series in the later 1950s. Fleming, a veteran of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. invented a spy who appealed The U.S. sales of Bond novels skyrocketed in March 1961 when President John Kennedy disclosed he was a fan. Spies were now seen as...