Jane Mayer, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. The New Yorker, 13 August 2007. After 11 September 2001 a secret C.I.A. program was started “in which terrorist suspects…were detained in ‘black sites’–secret prisons outside the United States–and subjected to unusually harsh treatment.” [Read more…]
December 16, 2005
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Warrants
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. The New York Times, 16 December 2005. “Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.” James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their stories on warrantless domestic eavesdropping.
August 18, 1996
Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Cocaine Explosion in the US
Gary Webb, Dark Alliance. San Jose Mercury News (online at Narco News), 18, 19 and 20 August 1996 and 16 September 1996. Part One, 18 August 1996: “America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicaragua war. Colombia-SanFrancisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras. Backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in early ’80s to help finance war–and a plague was born.” Part Two, 19 August 1996: “How a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager created the cocaine pipeline, and how crack was ‘born’ in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974. [In the] shadowy origins of ‘crack’ epidemic, [the] role of CIA-linked agents [was] a well-protected secret until now [August 1996]. Part Three, 20 August 1996: [The] war on drugs has [an] unequal impact on black Americans. [The] Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life.”