CovertAction Bulletin

Student protests in solidarity with Palestine have set up protests and encampments on campuses across the country from Columbia, NYU and the New School in New York to Berkeley, Stanford and Cal Poly Humboldt in California. Students are demanding that their universities - many of them among the most elite in the country with giant endowments - divest from weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies...

Iran carried out a strike over the weekend of April 13 and 14 in retaliation for the Israeli bombing on April 1 of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. Embassies are the sovereign territory of the country represented, effectively making it an Israeli attack on Iran. In the West, the Iranian response, which was announced in advance and targeted only a military base, has received significantly mo...

The Biden Administration is pursuing a policy of “energy chasing,” where U.S. regulators put pressure on foreign-owned fuel supply companies, shippers and even financial insurers so that they back out of deals to bring “fuel to our ports.” On March 17, there were significant protests in eastern Cuba against the blackouts. The president says the authorities have gone to dialogue with them and expla...

The Korean War has never ended - despite the US government’s attempts to portray it as a long-ago victory, it has never signed a peace agreement with North Korea. Tens of thousands of US troops continue to be stationed on the Korean peninsula, first part of the Cold War and now part of the New Cold War encirclement of China. The devastating war killed 4 million Koreans and left much of the North a...

The British High Court of Justice ruled on March 26 that the United States government has until April 16 to make “assurances” that if extradited, Julian Assange will be treated fairly by US courts and prisons. But this is hard to believe when the US government already had plans to kidnap and kill Assange, drawn up by Mike Pompeo’s CIA. We’re joined by Sean Blackmon, host of Darker than Blue on WPF...

On March 13, the House of Representatives passed HR 7521, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill would force Beijing-based ByteDance to sell the popular social media app TikTok, or it would be banned on app stores in the U.S. Far from being in the interests of advancing data privacy or the security of working-class people in the United States, banning T...

For the so-called “greatest democracy on Earth,” elections in the United States are a mess of regulations and laws that differ by state. The system is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. Just as they seek to destroy any dissent that challenges their status quo, they do so in the electoral arena by placing onerous requirements on independent candidates and third parties, restrictin...

Millions of people took to the streets around the world on March 2nd in solidarity with the people of Gaza as Israel is reportedly preparing an invasion of Rafah later this week, just before the start of Ramadan. In New York City, Havana, Albuquerque, Caracas, British Columbia, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and beyond, the massive day of mobilization shows that the movement against the Israeli genocide in P...

February 24 marked the second anniversary of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. With tens of thousands dead and more wounded on both sides and no end in sight to the conflict, it’s important to remember that the history of this conflict did not begin on February 24, 2022, nor on February 22, 2014, when the Russian military took control of the Crimean Peninsula. We discuss this and other les...

It’s Day X. Hearings are happening in the United Kingdom to determine whether Julian Assange will be extradited to the United States. His lawyers are trying to convince the UK’s High Court of Justice to permit an appeal hearing. If the court declines, it’s very likely that Assange will be extradited within days and face trial here. The long case of Julian Assange has been a travesty of justice. Wh...

Nancy Pelosi’s been in office for 37 years. She’s an ardent supporter of capitalism and imperialism, telling a college student who asked her in 2017 that “I have to say, we’re capitalist - and that’s just the way it is” at a time when 51% of 18-29 year olds said they didn’t support capitalism. She was part of the push on Obama to bomb Syria in 2013, she’s a hawk on Iran and she’s said that US supp...

Thousands of people marched through the streets of Austin, TX on February 4th, calling for a ceasefire and for the state government to withdraw all state funding from Israel. According to the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Texas’ share of the annual funding the US gives Israel is $298.367,616. Austin alone pays nearly $15 million of that. Houston’s at $32 million, Dallas about $19 million, an...

The decade between 2012 and 2021 saw the killings of 1,733 environmental activists across the globe. Corporate profits rose to record high levels in 2022 - while people were still feeling the impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic. Antibiotics fed to cows by beef suppliers for major supermarkets and fast food chains could create a huge public health crisis through the spread of “superbugs.” Twitter had...

400,000 people rallied and marched in Washington, DC on Saturday the 13th, marking 100 days since the Palestinian liberation movement and the international solidarity movement gained renewed energy. On the same day, half a million people marched in London, and other events took place across the world. The march was called by the American Muslim Task Force for Palestine, whose members include Ameri...

The Islamic State has taken credit for an attack that killed 84 people and left dozens wounded in Kerman, in southern Iran. The bombing was significant because it was on the anniversary of the assassination by the United States of Qasem Soleimani, who was the commander of the Iranian Quds force 1998 until he was killed on January 3rd, 2020 by a U.S. drone strike under the orders of Donald Trump. A...

The U.S. and Israel are quickly escalating the conflict in the Middle East. On December 31st, the Navy sank three Yemeni boats in the Red Sea. 10 Yemenis were killed in this attack. The boats were part of the Yemeni Armed Forces grouping that have been preventing passage of Israeli ships, or those heading to Israeli ports, through the Red Sea. While the Yemeni Armed Forces have been largely succes...

The United States government is inserting itself into a border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana on behalf of ExxonMobil. The oil-rich Essequibo region has the world’s biggest reserves per capita of crude oil and in May of this year, a “significant discovery” by ExxonMobil was announced in the area’s 6.6-million acre Staborek Block oil field. In a December 3rd referendum, 10.4 million Venezuela...

The US House of Representatives recently passed HR 888, reaffirming the State of Israel’s right to exist by a vote of 412-1. And HR 894, which says the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti semitism” has passed by a vote of 311-14 with 92 abstentions. Imperialist media continues to make unsubstantiated claims about what the Palestinian resistance did or did not do on October 7...

On November 26, three young Palestinian men were shot in Burlington, Vermont. Hisham Awartani, a junior at Brown University, released a statement that was read at a campus vigil saying, “This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate the love of every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in a much wider conflict.” Awartani’s friends Kinnan Abdalhamaid, a stud...

Malcolm X might have said it best: “The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people...

While most social media platforms spy on us, manipulate our emotions with hidden algorithms, feed our data to governments on request and censor with no notice or transparency, can there be an alternative that’s friendly for everyone to use? We talk with John Kiriakou and Sean O’Brien about Pancake, a new messaging technology being built to address that question. We also discuss the important news...

November 4th has been declared an International Day of Solidarity with Palestine. Over 100 demonstrations will take place that day around the world in solidarity with Palestine, from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Berlin to Kuala Lampur, Athens to Algiers.  Meanwhile demonstrations have continued across the world every day. All of this organizing and action flies in the face of the prevailing Western...

Protests across the world in solidarity with Palestine are building a support movement for the Palestinian resistance and cause, showing leaders that people from the US to the UK to Yemen and Jordan and beyond stand with the Palestinian people in their fight against the US-backed Israeli occupation. These protests are changing the shape of media coverage and influencing popular opinion and the deb...

As the IDF continues its bombardment of Palestine and prepares for a possible ground invasion, protests across the world continue to oppose the apartheid Israeli government and those who are complicit or active in supporting it - like the United States with its $3.8 billion in aid as well as immeasurable political and media support.  With these protests have come countless solidarity statements an...

On October 7th, the Palestinian resistance launched its Al-Aqsa Flood uprising against the decades-long occupation by Israel. Despite $3.8 billion every year in military aid from the US and a vast military and surveillance state, the Israeli government seemingly had no warning to this carefully-planned advance. In response, Israel has declared a “total war” on Gaza. It’s shut down access to electr...