Favorite For the Beltrán Leyva Organization, one of Mexico’s most notorious cartels, collecting cocaine from their Colombian suppliers was supposed to be a straightforward process. The Colombians would travel to international waters near Mexico, where they would meet Beltran-Leyva powerboats and submarines. The cocaine haul was loaded onto Mexican cartel vessels and brought to shore.…
All posts tagged National Security
The Secrets Presidents Keep in Their Garages and Luxury Resorts
Favorite President Joe Biden departs Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 15, 2023. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both facing special counsel investigations into their retention of classified documents after leaving office. The materials discovered in locations controlled by Biden reportedly relate to his time…
Guccifer, the Hacker Who Launched Clinton Email Flap, Speaks Out After Nearly a Decade Behind Bars
Favorite Marcel Lehel Lazar walked out of Federal Correctional Institute Schuylkill, a Pennsylvania prison, in August 2021. The 51-year-old formerly known only as Guccifer had spent over four years incarcerated for an email hacking spree against America’s elite. Though these inbox disclosures arguably changed the course of the nation’s recent history, Lazar himself remains an…
Jim Jordan Is No Frank Church
Favorite Sen. Frank Church during a session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA in 1975. Photo: Bettmann Archive In one of their very first steps since taking over the House of Representatives, House Republicans have created a special new panel to launch wide-ranging investigations into what they allege are the ways in which…
More Than 150 International Organizations Call on Biden to Close Guantánamo on 21st Anniversary
Favorite On the 21st anniversary of the first orange-jumpsuit clad “unlawful enemy combatants” arriving blindfolded and shackled to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, more than 150 international human rights organizations are urging President Joe Biden to finally shutter the prison. The letter, coordinated by the Center for Victims of Torture, or CVT, and the…
Those Russian Twitter Bots Didn't Do $#!% in 2016, Says New Study
Favorite Since the 2016 presidential election, the notion that the Russian government somehow “weaponized” social media to push voters to Donald Trump has been widely taken as a gospel in liberal circles. A groundbreaking recent New York University study, however, says there’s no evidence Russian tweets had any meaningful effect at all. “We demonstrate, first,…
Sabri al-Qurashi Has Lived Without Legal Status in Kazakhstan Since His 2014 Guantánamo Release
Favorite “I’m trying to be OK,” Sabri al-Qurashi texted me one afternoon after I asked how he was. Al-Qurashi has made it through a lot, but he’s increasingly depressed, tired, and has become desperate for his living conditions to change. By now, he has spent two decades feeling trapped with no end in sight. Al-Qurashi lived…
How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power
Favorite “The battle between good and evil has come now.” — Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are…
A Competitor Put the FBI on Haoyang Yu's Trail. The Investigation Didn't Go as Planned.
Favorite Paul Blount started small. When he set up a semiconductor chip company in his basement in 2006, he was the only employee. He had spent a decade at the chip behemoth Hittite Microwave Corporation, and he saw room in the market for a boutique design outfit. About a decade later, a man named Haoyang…
Twitter Aided the Pentagon in its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
Favorite Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform. Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts…