There’s a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises. Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments. A growing movement is ready to see that end.

The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it.

“Your father is a murderer”

Was he? Or did William Colby act for what he saw as the highest good for America and the the world? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can we ever really know our families? These questions and more are at the center of The Man Nobody Knew, a portrait of William Colby, by his son and Emmy-award winning director, Carl Colby, our guest tonight.

In an otherwise interesting article summarizing much of what is wrong with the non-accountability policies of the U.S. state when it comes to punishing its torturers, Associated Press reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo repeat in passing an old canard about the CIA’s previous activities in regards to interrogation. The CIA had never been in [...]

After three-and-a-half years, author Michael Otterman is closing shop over at his “American Torture” blog. The site was named after his book of the same title. Much of what I have wrote about over the years first found its expression in Michael Otterman’s incredible history of U.S. torture experimentation and implementation. While his website isn’t accepting or posting new submissions, Mike isn’t dropping off the radar. Along with Richard Hil and Paul Wilson, he just published another amazing work of political journalism. In his new book, Erasing Iraq: the Human Costs of Carnage, Otterman again traces the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq.