CovertAction Bulletin

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan, marking a major escalation of U.S. aggression towards China. While this may not on it’s face seem alarming, the reality is that the U.S. is playing with fire. 1979 was the last time that a U.S. head of state or member of the ruling party visited Taiwan. Since the 70’s the official policy of the U.S. has been the One China policy, and...

Amazon wants to be your retailer, educator, grocery store, security system, bank and now your healthcare provider: A few days ago, reports came out that the tech giant is looking to buy One Medical for $4 billion, its latest foray into the healthcare business. At the same time, Amazon provides law enforcement with easy access to massive amounts of data and the tools to parse it. Of course it’s not...

The chilling video released last week of the police response inside Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX on May 24 exposes the police. Dressed in tactical gear, officers waited over an hour to confront the gunman who killed 21 people in a senseless act of violence. Rather than being a local problem, this is a national issue: Over and over again, videos - many of them shot by bystanders - show police kill...

On today’s show we discuss the deep implications that the Supreme Court's decision to take up Harper v Moore could have on the fundamental institution of U.S. democracy. The Supreme Court’s ruling on this case could rip the mask off of the sham of U.S. democracy and reveal the clear dictatorship of the rich. The recent overturn of Roe, the ongoing January 6th committee hearings, and now the t...

The January 6 hearings and this term’s Supreme Court decisions are exposing the right-wing nature of the U.S. state and its institutions. January 6 was plotted in the open and with the apparent support of the highest levels of government, and many questions remain unanswered: why were the Capitol Police so outnumbered? Who donated the massive amounts of money required to mobilize in the days and w...

On today’s show, we discuss the unprecedented roll-back of women’s rights and civil liberties with the overturn of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe V. Wade. After the decision dropped thousands upon thousands of people poured into the streets in places across the country. As of now, in 7 states the abortion trigger laws, written to go into place if Roe was overturned, have gone into effect...

United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. Assange faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. With diplomats hinting...

Activist and journalist Walter Smolarek interrupted General Secretary of the OAS, Luis Almagro and confronted Almagro about his role in the coup in Bolivia. We interviewed Walter the day after the interruption at the People’s Summit for Democracy which took place from June 8th through 10th in Los Angeles.  The People’s Summit wasn’t just a protest of Biden’s so-called Summit of the Americas, which...

On this week’s episode, we speak with Mike Rothmiller, former LAPD officer with the infamous Office of Criminal Intelligence Division (OCID), a historian and a New York Times best-selling author of many different books including the LA Secret Police: Inside the LAPD’s Elite Spy Network and Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe. Based on his own experiences and years of research,...

On today’s episode, we are joined by Claudia de la Cruz of the People’s Forum in New York City to discuss developments around President Biden’s Summit of the Americas. Scheduled for June 6-10 in Los Angeles, the legitimacy of the gathering and the role of the U.S. in Central & South American is being severely threatened by announcements from Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras and Antigua and Barbuda th...

Biden announced last month the assembly of a team within the Department of Homeland Security given the title Disinformation Governing Board. Supposedly this team will be working to combat Russian, Iranian, and Chinese “disinformation.” We dive deeper into the contradictory history of misinformation about Ukraine in 2014 spread by the executive director of the board, Nina Jankowicz. We are then joi...

On today’s show, we bring you the second half of our interview with Tings Chak, Researcher and art director at Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research, and a member of the Dongsheng Collective. We focus on the Chinese government’s programs to eradicate extreme poverty in the country and further discuss her work on the study “ Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China ” for...

In this special episode of CovertAction Bulletin, we spent the entire hour with John Kiriakou. A former CIA analyst and field agent, Kiriakou became a whistleblower when he exposed the CIA’s torture program - and became the only person jailed for it.  We discuss how the ongoing campaign against Julian Assange should inform us about how to view and support the work of other whistleblowers. While As...

On today’s show we dive into the big news that Elon Musk spent 44 billion dollars to buy twitter. He claims he will make the algorithms open source, but there’s obviously many doubts about that. What does this development mean for the platform? We are joined by Rania Khalek, journalist and host of the show dispatches on BreakThrough News to discuss the release of Steven Donzinger after years of co...

Is western media coverage of the COVID lockdown in Shanghai completely accurate? The corporate media has been non-stop talking about the “dystopian” lockdown in Shanghai claiming people are starving in mass. The question “at what cost” pops up in articles across the news cycle questioning China’s lockdown policies. The logistical challenges for Shanghai’s local government to manage a lockdown in r...

The recent case of Liselle Herrera, a 26 year old woman charged with murder for performing a “self-induced abortion” made national news, bringing attention again to the human rights crisis happening in Texas around reproductive rights. What people don’t know is that this crisis is fueled by dark money, corruption, and deeper right-wing capitalist agendas for deregulation. How much money is changin...

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday that weapons and other equipment, including anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, Humvees and Puma drones, are being sent to Ukraine and NATO allies at “an unprecedented pace.” At the UN Security Council, in the White House and at NATO briefings, the military officials, politicians and the press only seem to be able to discuss sen...

In Hawaii thousands of people have been displaced and 93,000 have had their water poisoned by the Red Hill Navy facility. This is after two fuel leaks just last year, and a major fuel leak of 27,000 gallons of fuel in 2014. The Navy sacrifices water for war by refusing to do anything about the facility, which activists demand should be closed and fuel tanks drained immediately.  We are joined by W...

As the US government continues to say it does not want US or NATO forces coming into direct conflict with Russian troops, a recent report in Yahoo News revealed that since 2015, the CIA has been overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces who are trained for insurgency. What is the real purpose of this CIA program? And what does it actua...

We are joined on today’s show by Amanda Yee, host of the podcast Radio Free Amanda to discuss the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta Spa shooting. The epidemic of anti-Asian violence has grown exponentially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, Asian Americans have always been viewed as “enemy aliens” as the FBI and U.S. government had historically called it. We discuss the...

The information war has heated up, this time with targets on the backs of anti-war journalists and media voices critical to NATO and the U.S. Last week, the offices of RT America were suddenly and abruptly shut down amid the war fever and Russophobia spreading across the country. In addition to banning an entire network, platforms like Twitter and Spotify have also taken steps to discredit individ...

The outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine did not come out of nowhere. Fundamental to understanding the current moment is the history of NATO expansion in Europe — which the U.S. repeatedly promised Russia would not happen.  We are joined by Richard Becker of the ANSWER Coalition to discuss the events in Ukraine and Russia from 2014 leading up to the current crisis. We ask the question, what...

Today we turn to Philip Agee, ex-CIA Case Officer from 1957 to 1969. After a series of short extraordinary excerpts from interviews with Philip Agee, featured in the classic documentary history of the CIA entitled “On Company Business," David Giglio goes in-depth with Louis Wolf and Chris Agee discussing Phil and the history of CovertAction Magazine .   Philip Agee was stationed in various pa...

Today we turn to whistleblower Bill Binney, the former intelligence official and Technical Director of the National Security Agency, and go in-depth on the surveillance state, how 9/11 could have been avoided, Russiagate and more... Bill resigned in the wake of 9/11 after more than 30 years with the NSA. He was a critic of his former employers during the Bush Sr. and Jr. administrations, and later...

In this episode, we turn to Nicaragua and the recent elections that just took place last month, on November 7th. Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas won the elections with over 75% of the vote. Nicaragua’s non-partisan, independent Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) reported that over 65% of the 4.4 million eligible voters (16 years and older) participated in the election. Meanwhile, the mainstream med...