Portside

Reader Comments - CIA Lied About Torture; A New Civil Rights Movement?; Grand Jury Injustice - Justice Demanded; Members of Congress (and staffers) join protest; Illegal Cop Murders; Police Reform? - Bolder Steps Needed; Low Wage Workers: 'We Can't Breathe'; Slavery, Founding Fathers and Torture; Congress Plots against Pensions; Pardon Snowden, Manning and Leonard Peltier; Israel Lobby and Ukraine; War on Terror; Israel, U.S. and space weapons; New Republic; Correction

In the 1960s, the agency sought to fight Communism through the students rights movement. There's little reason to think its tactics have changed.

In the 1960s, the agency sought to fight Communism through the students’ rights movement. There’s little reason to think its tactics have changed.

Citizenfour, Laura Poitras's new film on Edward Snowden, with breaking news at film's end: there is indeed at least one new, post-Snowden whistleblower who has come from somewhere inside the U.S. intelligence world with information about a watchlist (that includes Poitras) with "more than 1.2 million names" on it and on the American drone assassination program. No matter how fiercely the government may set out after whistleblowers, there will be more. It's unstoppable.

U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes. Information was readily available that these were compromised men. The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality and McCarthyism. Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.believed "moderate" Nazis might "be useful" to America, records show.

As “now it can be told” theater, TimeLine’s Chicago premiere, the second coming of this angry work, works equally well as an exercise in conspiracy-theory paranoia, journalistic sleuthing at its most dangerous, and a cumulative plea for transparency in foreign policy, banking, and law enforcement (Edward Snowden anyone?).

According to McClatchy Newspapers, the agency has also been spying on emails from whistle blower officials and Congress, "triggering fears the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistle blower cases."

Mark Weisbrot shows the daily protests are anything but peaceful. In fact, about half of the daily death toll from Venezuela that we see in the media - now at 41 -- are actually civilians and security forces apparently killed by protesters. Dario Azzellini argues the protests in Venezuela represent a vicious attack on the country's social progress under Hugo Chávez, spurred on by anti-Chavista politicians in affluent regions.

The plot begins in the bad years after 9/11 when the CIA embraced global torture in the war against terrorism. Official Washington was traumatized by the attack and looked the other way, pretending not to know what the spooks were doing. The men in black plucked various "terrorists" off the Arab Street shipping them to less squeamish countries around the world where the US agents used medieval methods for pain and punishment, techniques officially prohibited by US law.

Ending Poverty vs. Paul Ryan's Budget; Military Spending; Immigrant Workers; CIA Detentions, Guantanamo and now Spying on Congress; Beyond Capitalism; GM Recall; Tony Benn; Social Media and Drones...