In the wake of the 1973 coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, Charles Horman, a young American journalist, was abducted from his home in Santiago, tortured and executed. His widow Joyce and his father Edmund spent agonizing weeks in Chile looking for him before finally learning of […]

More than a quarter century after the execution in Chile of Charles Horman, an American freelance journalist, Washington has released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death. The Horman case was made famous by the Hollywood movie Missing. Directed by Constantino Costa Gavras, the film dramatized the struggle of […]

Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls in the church — Denise McNair, age 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley […]

Azerbaijan’s record on freedom of expression, assembly, and association has been on a steady decline for some years, but it has seen a dramatic deterioration since mid-2012. Since then the government has been engaged in a concerted effort to curtail opposition political activity, punish public allegations of corruption and other criticism of government practices, and […]

Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department has established an intelligence operation that in some ways has been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core is a spying operation targeting Arab- and Muslim-Americans where they live, work and pray. The NYPD’s “Demographics Unit,” as it was known until 2010, has […]

Tunisian newspaper Al Maghreb published a document Saturday that appears to contain details of intelligence obtained by the Ministry of Interior prior to the assassination of opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi. The memo from the ministry’s National Security Administration states that the Foreign Security Administration received a letter from someone in the United States Central Intelligence […]

Despite assurances from President Obama, the scandal around the National Security Agency continues to grow. The Guardian reports the NSA has routinely passed raw intelligence to Israel about U.S. citizens. “The NSA was sharing what they call raw signals intelligence, which includes things like who you are calling and when you are calling, the content […]

The agreement for the US to provide raw intelligence data to Israel was reached in principle in March 2009, the document shows. Photograph: James Emery The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower […]

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 9 (UPI) — The Israeli military’s top-secret Unit 8200, the Jewish state’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, has spawned a generation of high-tech start-ups and more technology millionaires than many business schools, and these days the cyber security sector is booming. Unit 8200 is now the Israeli military’s biggest […]

Ben Zygier war ein Mossad-Agent, der Geheimnisse an Israels Feinde weitergab. Während der Isolationshaft erhängte sich der Spion. Die genauen Umstände seiner Haft will Jerusalem unter keinen Umständen preisgeben – und bezahlt Zygiers Familie für ihr Schweigen. Tel Aviv – Einer der spektakulärsten Justizfälle der israelischen Geschichte hat ein finanzielles Nachspiel. Israels Regierung will die […]

Family of Australian-born Mossad agent who died in jail in 2010 while facing treason charges, is offered settlement Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X, picture in a still from an ABC TV report. Photograph: AAP/ABC TV Israel is to pay more than $1m to the family of Ben Zygier, an Australian-born Mossad agent who hanged […]

Justice ministry says $1.1 million to be paid to family of alleged Mossad spy who hanged himself in prison. Zygier known as “Prisoner X” was found hanged in his isolation cell in Ayalon prison near in December 2010. [EPA] Israel is to pay more than $1 million to the family of an alleged Mossad spy […]

The move is designed to keep their allegation of negligence from becoming a public lawsuit that could expose state secrets Israel has agreed to pay four million shekels (£714,000) in compensation to the family of an Australian-Israeli Mossad agent who apparently committed suicide while being held in secret detention in 2010. The settlement with relatives […]

This time it’s Syria, last time it was Iraq. Obama chose to accept the entire Pentagon of the Bush era: its wars and war crimes Children, many of whose deformities are believed to be the results of the chemical dioxin that the US used in the Vietnam war, play outside a hospital in Ho Chi […]

Many times I’ve mentioned the foreign-policy assessments of William R. Polk, at right, who first wrote for the Atlantic (about Iraq) during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, back in 1958, and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff during the Kennedy years. He now has sent in a detailed analysis about Syria. Polk wrote this just […]

For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now US troops fire a white phosphorous mortar towards a Taliban position on 3 April 2009 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: John Moore/Getty You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive […]

Fast 1500 Menschen starben beim Giftgas-Angriff des Assad-Regimes am 21. August in Damaskus. BILD am SONNTAG erfuhr jetzt aus deutschen Sicherheitskreisen: Die Truppen des Diktators wollten schon häufiger Giftgas einsetzen. Seit rund vier Monaten haben syrische Divisions- und Brigadekommandeure immer wieder den Einsatz von Chemiewaffen beim Präsidentenpalast in Damaskus gefordert. Das belegen Funkgespräche, die vom […]

UN chemical weapons experts carry samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus on August 28, 2013. Photograph: Stringer/REUTERS ‘I created Transjordan,” Winston Churchill once boasted, “with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo.” Take a look at what remains of Jordan 90 years later and […]

Federal court order prohibits Brown from talking to the media in what critics say is latest in crackdown on investigative journalism Brown’s lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown’s first amendment rights. Photograph: Nikki Loehr A federal court in Dallas, Texas has imposed a gag order on the jailed activist-journalist Barrett Brown […]

The mid-June sun is setting on the Mansfield jail near Dallas when Barrett Brown, the former public face of Anonymous, shuffles into the visitors hall wearing a jumpsuit of blazing orange. Once the nattiest anarchist around, Brown now looks like every other inmate in the overcrowded North Texas facility, down to his state-issued faux-Crocs, the […]

The New York Times has revealed the Drug Enforcement Administration has an even more extensive collection of U.S. phone records than the National Security Agency. Under a secretive DEA program called the Hemisphere Project, the agency has access to records of every phone call transmitted via AT&T’s infrastructure dating back to 1987. That period covers […]

For at least six years, US anti-drug agents have used subpoenas to routinely gain access to an enormous AT&T database. It’s an intrusion greater in scale and longevity than the NSA’s collection of phone calls, revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. As part of the secret Hemisphere Project the government has been paying AT&T to place […]

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs. […]

Narco-Trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero Knows Where All the Skeletons Are Buried in the US’ Dirty Drug War The recent release from a Mexican prison of Rafael Caro Quintero — a godfather in Mexico’s narco-trafficking world — rips a scab off a long metastasizing tumor in the US drug war. A Mexican federal court on Friday, […]

So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret […]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years. The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and […]

UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA’s secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate the information obtained from SOD. […]

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun reviewing a controversial unit inside the Drug Enforcement Administration that uses secret domestic surveillance tactics — including intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency — to target Americans for drug offenses. According to a series of articles published by Reuters, agents are instructed to recreate the investigative trail […]

The Turkish Community in Germany has published a report responding to a series of racist murders authorities failed to detect for years. The paper is intended to complement recommendations put forward by a parliamentary committee. In response to recommendations published last week by a committee in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, the Turkish Community in […]

Der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz setzte den Neonazi Kai-Uwe Trinkaus als Informanten ein – und verstieß damit einem Gutachten zufolge massiv gegen Dienstvorschriften. Und dann kündigte der ehemalige NPD-Spitzenfunktionär einen Gewaltakt an. Doch niemand reagierte. Kai-Uwe Trinkaus bot seine Dienste selbst an. Der berüchtigte Neonazi und NPD-Funktionär rief am 31. Mai 2006 beim Thüringer Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz […]

Überraschung im NSU-Prozess: Wenn Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos und Uwe Böhnhardt mit Weggefährten über den Einsatz von Gewalt diskutierten, war ein V-Mann des Thüringer Verfassungsschutzes dabei. Das Bundeskriminalamt geht davon aus, dass Tino Brandt zu denen gehörte, die Gewalt befürworteten. Aus dem Gericht von Annette Ramelsberger Möglicherweise hat ein V-Mann des Verfassungsschutzes die Mitglieder des […]

Eine mit der Mordwaffe baugleiche Pistole wird im Polizeipräsidium in Dortmund vor eine Bilderwand mit den Porträts von Opfern einer deutschlandweiten Mordserie, der so genannten Döner- Morde Der Schlüssel zu einer der unheimlichsten Mordserien Deutschlands ist eine tschechische Pistole, Marke Ceska, Typ 83, Kaliber 7,65 Millimeter. Mit dieser Waffe wurden von 2000 bis 2006 neun […]

News about Libya — the Benghazi Attacks, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his spy chief Abdullah al-Senoussi are among those charged with murder in relation to country’s 2011 civil war.MORE » Aug. 21, 2013 Four midlevel State […]

Documents show State Department knew of security problems in Benghazi but failed to fix them. Creation of an Undersecretary for Diplomatic Security Exemptions of Security Requirements for Benghazi Source Document Complete Report of the Benghazi Panel State Department Memo Recommends Reforms The US Department of State has known for decades that inadequate security at embassies […]

  When U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in a flash of hatred in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, the political finger-pointing began. But few knew exactly what had happened that night. With the ticktock narrative of the desperate fight to save Stevens, Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz provide answers. By Fred […]

The Government was accused of “breathtaking laxity” in its arms controls last night after it emerged that officials authorised the export to Syria of two chemicals capable of being used to make a nerve agent such as sarin a year ago. The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, will today be asked by MPs to explain why […]

British companies were given government licences in January 2012 to export chemicals that could have been used to make nerve gas in Syria, ten months after civil broke out in the country, it was revealed Sunday. The UK government approved licences for British firms in January 2012 to export chemicals to Syria that could have […]

FURIOUS politicians have demanded Prime Minister David Cameron explain why chemical export licences were granted to firms last January – 10 months after the Syrian uprising began. BRITAIN allowed firms to sell chemicals to Syria capable of being used to make nerve gas, the Sunday Mail can reveal today. Export licences for potassium fluoride and […]

Among questionable ethical deals was £35m lent to Robert Mugabe and spent on BAE’s Hawk fighter jets Robert Mugabe bought five BAE systems Hawk jets between 1989 and 1992 and deployed them in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images Britain’s arms industry and other companies are to be called […]

A former head of MI6 has threatened to expose the secrets of the ‘dodgy dossier’ if he disagrees with the long-awaited findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s role in the Iraq War. Sir Richard Dearlove has threatened to expose secrets behind the Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’. Photo: JOHN TAYLOR Sir Richard Dearlove, 68, has […]