PATRICK LAWRENCE: Mike Pompeo’s Cold-War Fever
As this dreadful year draws near its close, the top U.S. diplomat has put us at far more risk of war than we were at its start. Will we start a war with Iran? Will we invade Venezuela? Will we…
THE REVELATIONS OF WIKILEAKS: No. 8—Busting the Myth WikiLeaks Published Nothing on Israel & Syria
One myth about WikiLeaks is that it favors U.S. enemies and declines to publish documents against them, while another legend is that WikiLeaks, for obscure reasons, is soft on Israel, reports Patrick Lawrence. As WikiLeaks continued its document releases, and as major news organizations continued…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Iranian Tankers & the Age of Interdiction
Two forms of interdiction — the steady expansion of U.S. sanctions and our stunning drift toward unmasked censorship — have begun to intersect. Over the weekend, a sixth Iranian cargo ship entered Venezuelan waters and is due to dock shortly. It follows…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: ‘As the Clever Hopes Expire’: A Look Back at the Ending Decade
A monumentally destructive U.S. decade — symptomatic of imperial decline — exposed a shamefully pliant press. But we have at least one reason to resist incurable pessimism. I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-Second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Finally Time for DNC Email Evidence
The crumbling of Russiagate focuses attention on the considerable evidence that Russian intelligence agencies charged with intrusion into DNC servers had nothing to do with it. Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it…
The Battle for Our Minds
There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but given the state of corporate media, perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds, says Patrick Lawrence. After reading The New York Times piece “The Plot to Subvert an…
More than a muckraker: Robert Parry believed in the possibilities of our craft
A legendary reporter who broke the Iran-contra story, Bob Parry left the mainstream media and blazed his own path When news of Robert Parry’s death reached me a week ago, I had to stop working for a long time. I…
On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power
Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War. In Part 1 of my exchange with Joel Whitney, conducted shortly after OR Books published Finks: How the CIA Tricked the…
Are We Witnessing a Coup Operation Against the Trump White House?
Our intelligence apparatus is doing far more than stoking paranoia about the Russian bogeyman—it’s threatening democracy. A couple of books come to mind amid the relentless leaks emanating from the spooks on either side of the Potomac and, not to…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Assassins & Iran
Any thought of Biden and his people riding into town on white horses to save the nuclear deal is strictly naïve. I was on the telephone with a friend in Tehran Sunday and found myself telling him about a Christmas card…