Portside

Reader Comments - Selma; Civil Rights Tour led by Julian Bond; Ferguson Grand Jury; Police, NYPD, PBA, de Blasio; Women telling their Story; Wealth and Inequality; Sports - A Radical Proposal; BDS, Israel, Palestine, Solidarity; Sony; The Interview; Privatization and Hucksterism; Climate Change, Marx and Nature; Healthcare; Superbugs; the Ukraine; Announcements - The American Labor Movement At A Crossroads; Elections in Greece: Can Syriza Break with Austerity?

Sony and the hackers captured the year-end news cycle for over a month, unveiling a treasure trove of emails exposing stark flashes of the hidden underbelly of Hollywood. Certain "racist" emails of Sony executive Amy Pascal were made public. The hackers are unknown, yet the media was initially more than ready to accept the initial government claims.

Reader Comments-Colbert Nation; Is It Band Enough Yet; Southern Jim Crow Murder; Cuba; How America's Relationship With Cuba Will Change; We express our condolences - Millions March NYC and Center for Constitutional Rights; Angela Davis on police violence; Youth Shall Lead in struggle against police violence; Political Athletes; "Negro-Jewish Unity" and IWO; torture; FBI; Panama invasion; New resources: On Torture; Staughton Lynd book; Stevie Wonder; theater review

A review of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, by Betty Medsger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) by Lawrence S. Wittner. The Burglary tells the story of how, on March 8, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, eight peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in an effort to discover whether the FBI was working, illegally, to suppress American dissent.

Reader Comments- Keystone XL-What Next; Mexico; Elizabeth Warren; Voter Suppression; War and Democracy; A White Manifesto?; US-China Climate Accord; Responses to Naomi Klein; Schools and Prisons; Housing Discrimination; FBI Plot - Martin Luther King Suicide; Net Neutrality; Global Economic Divide; COSATU and NUMSA; Announcements - 2014 & Looking Forward to 2016- New York- Dec 2; Voter, Civil & Workers Rights- New York- Dec 11; She's Beautiful When She's Angry- showings

Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep email, read texts, track calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

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.

Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.

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.

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.