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When looking at the aggressive, almost military police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a big dose of collective amnesia makes it easy to forget that the United States has been here before. And may yet be there again.
There’s a rush to judgment about who shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. That’s clearly dangerous with Ukraine a flashpoint in what appears to be turning into a new Cold War. Here are some things to think about as we try to separate fact from speculation and even outright fiction.
A poll in Boston turned up a surprising finding—42 percent of those polled are unsure if Boston Marathon Bombing suspect Dzohkhar Tsarnaev is guilty. That’s a shock given the dominant media narrative that says he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet the case is still full of lots of contradictions and unanswered questions that beg for answers.
“Hacktivist journo” Barrett Brown is facing less jail time thanks to a plea deal unsealed last week. He is also more able to speak, since a judge has now lifted a gag order in the case. And that is an important development because as WhoWhatWhy discovered, prosecutors not only wanted to keep the man in prison—they wanted to keep him very quiet.
A quick look back at some of the groundbreaking reporting WhoWhatWhy has done on the Boston bombing case—why we’ve done it, and why we believe it matters.
In the final part of our series, the story of the color film of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was locked and hidden from Americans—and even the Japanese—for decades. Frame by frame, the footage captured the horrors. If not for certain people, almost no one would have ever seen it.
FBI statistics show violent crime is down, but politicians keep funding more cops, lavishing them with military equipment, and training and encouraging them to act like soldiers instead of peace officers.
Recently, we published evidence of disturbing contradictions in the public accounts of the man who put the guilty stamp on the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston bombing case. In this second part of a series, we take an in-depth look at that man, the mystery witness. We examine his crucial but little understood role in rapidly ending the investigation of the bombing. Meet “Danny,” the “magic bullet” of the Boston bombing story.
We keep on learning more and more about the US government’s awareness of terrorist plots before they happened. Here’s testimony that the FBI had a guy in Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.
The old argument goes that conspiracies can’t happen because someone would eventually talk. The flaw in that logic is that people involved in plots rarely speak up—even if they want to—because when they do they nearly always pay a price. Edward Snowden, anyone? So as you read this ClassicWHO repost from two years ago, consider how much relevance it still has in the case of Edward Snowden.
What possible connection could there have been between George H.W. Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A. and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people, apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one live wire touch another. Here, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in November, is the tenth and final part of a series of excerpts from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker’s bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. The story is a real-life thriller.
U.S. banks are summarily canceling accounts of some customers with Islamic surnames. Why? They won’t say. And the trend is happening coast to coast, according to a Muslim advocacy group. Is the government behind it?