In the days leading up to the January 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol, officials inside the Department of Homeland Security were feeling anxious. Within the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the sole component of the federal government… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘National Security’
Echoes of FBI Entrapment Haunt Failed Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer
In October 2020, the FBI and the Justice Department announced the arrest of six Michigan militia members who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. The FBI claimed that federal agents had thwarted an elaborate plot hatched by the men to kidnap… Read More ›
Even After Acknowledging Abuses, the U.S. Continued to Employ Notorious Proxy Forces in Cameroon
Months after the head of U.S. Africa Command announced that funding for Cameroon’s armed forces would be slashed due to human rights concerns, the Pentagon continued employing members of an elite Cameroonian military unit long known for committing atrocities — including extrajudicial… Read More ›
Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Has Made His Worst Fears Come True
In the days before his arrest, Stewart Rhodes could feel the authorities circling. He met me on a chilly Dallas evening in January in a room I’d booked at a chain hotel not far from where he lived, the neon… Read More ›
A Pastor’s Legal Fight Against CBP Exposes a Reckless Surveillance Operation
The sun was beginning to set as Kaji Dousa neared the border. It was two days into 2019, and the line she was about to cross separating San Diego and Tijuana was the site of a politicized battle over the… Read More ›
I Spent 20 Years Covering America's Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext.
“U.S. Takes Hooded, Shackled Detainees to Cuba,” declared the Washington Post headline on January 11, 2002. The reporters who wrote it were on the ground at Guantánamo Bay and in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was in Washington, at my desk in… Read More ›
On “60 Minutes,” Reality Winner Opens Up About the Motivation for Her Leak and the Psychic Toll of Her Confinement
This weekend, “60 Minutes” aired the first TV interview given by Reality Winner since she was released from prison this summer. In 2017, Winner leaked a top-secret National Security Agency analysis of Russia’s attempt to penetrate U.S. election systems around… Read More ›
Report: Bit by Bit, the Noose Is Tightening Around the Nuclear Weapons Industry
For years, the Dutch organization PAX has been issuing reports detailing the Armageddon that’s hiding in plain sight. The business of nuclear weapons — and it is in fact a business — does not for the most part take place in… Read More ›
Biden to Pentagon: Keep the War Machine Running
After two decades of unceasing warfare in the Middle East and Central Asia, the Biden administration has unveiled its first comprehensive review of the deployment of U.S. forces globally — and it envisions a virtually unchanged military footprint, with a sharpened commitment… Read More ›
From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier
Many Democrats, liberals, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a… Read More ›