It is a measure of how accustomed official Washington has become to endless undeclared wars that the hearing room for the Senate Armed Services Committee was almost empty on Tuesday morning. The questioning of Army General Stephen Townsend, President Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Africa Command, was civil, if not perfunctory. In 2018, the...
Category: Activities
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How the FBI Profiles: From Bookstores to ‘Black Identity Extremists’
Last month Professor Joshua Clark Daniels excavated a forgotten story from the files of the FBI: the Bureau’s surveillance of black-owned bookstores from 1968 to 1974. Spying on bookstores might seem quaint in the the age of mass surveillance but there is a connection: how U.S. intelligence agencies see and understand their most vocal and...
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How the U.S. Could Prosecute Jamal Khashoggi’s Killers
Lee Bollinger, former president of Columbia University, echoes a suggestion I made last year: U.S. law enforcement could prosecute the killers of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I wrote here that the use of U.S. communication facilities in furtherance of the crime would give U.S. prosecutors jurisdiction. Writing in The Washington Post Bollinger agrees: The case...
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RIP Rafi Eitan, Mastermind of Mossad’s Uranium Heist
On September 10, 1968 Raphael Eitan and three other Israeli nationals arrived in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small city north of Pittsburgh that was home to a company called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. NUMEC packaged and stored enriched uranium, which it supplied to nuclear power plants in northeastern United States. Eitan, who died Saturday...
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The Man Who Asked Too Many JFK Questions
The late Charles Thomas belonged to an exclusive, unhappy and forgotten club: U.S. government officials whose efforts to honestly investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 cost them their jobs and reputations. Last week the Washington Post ran an obituary of Cynthia Thomas, the widow of Charles Thomas. It was an unusual...