Portside

After 9/11 the agency was given free rein to break the rules but when allowed to play dirty abroad, it's difficult to stop at home

A new Senate select committee is needed to investigate CIA-NSA-FBI wrong-doing - at home and abroad. Former chief counsel to the Church Committee calls for such a new committee and new investigation. As Senator Feinstein has revealed, the CIA will not only stall but even spy on Congress to impede its investigation of wrongdoing. The Church Committee found abuses and illegal acts going back to FDR's administration.

Senator Dianne Feinstein openly accused the CIA of spying on congressional staffers as they investigated the agency’s illegal detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush.

The government has everything to lose from violence in the demonstrations, and the opposition has something to gain. Protests are initiated by ultra-right factions of the opposition in the hope of an eventual systemic overhaul. When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the U.S. government says it is.

Operation Condor was a coordinated effort by dictatorships in Latin American countries, to track down and kill political opponents in their various countries—an effort that was deliberately aided, particularly during the mid-to-late ‘70s, by the CIA.

Edward Snowden's Christmas message - together we can end mass surveillance, otherwise "'a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.' Listen to message broadcast on England's Channel 4; and Washington Post story, based on 14 hours of interviews conducted in Moscow. "All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed," Snowden said.

Media coverage of Nelson Mandela's release from prison failed to mention there was strong evidence that the CIA had tipped off South African authorities to Mandela's location in 1962, resulting in his arrest. So with coverage of Mandela's death dominating the media now, can the story of the CIA's role in Mandela's capture be told?