New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
My latest, just posted on Daily Beast: “The only way out of this box is to negotiate,” Leon V. Sigal, the director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, told the…
From Korea, 1980, to New Orleans, 2005: How I came to be a humanitarian journalist For Chalmers Johnson, a great man who died this weekend. In February 1996, I broke a major story on U.S. foreign policy, reporting for the…
We’ll never see the likes of these again! But Cuba still has them – by the hundreds. It’s just amazing to watch them go by, and a flashback to the past of my parents and grandparents; way, way back. These…
I spent the last week in Havana, Cuba, at the invitation of the Jose Marti Institute of Journalism. A few days ago, I published a piece in Foreign Policy in Focus laying out some of my initial thoughts about my…
In which your correspondent tries to find the zeitgeist at Jon Stewart’s “Rally for Sanity” on the Mall in Washington, D.C., 10 Not really knowing what to expect, and loving any rally trying to counter the right-wing insanity in this…
…With a coda on the Pentagon Papers, 1971 Last Sunday, angry and fed up at the media’s relentless attacks on WikiLeaks and its general refusal to report the details of the thousands of once-secret battlefield reports from Iraq leaked over…
To Gary Snyder, who lives just down the road from here on San Juan Ridge, about 75 miles as the crows fly: Walking tonight, high Sierra: 2/3 moon on right, bright Jupiter on left. Wind the only sound. Reports of…
Just posted, from The Daily Beast. It’s well-known that Sidney Harman, the electronics mogul who just bought Newsweek, is married to Rep. Jane Harman, one of Washington’s heavyweights on intelligence. Rep. Harman, a Democrat, spent eight years on the House…
The CIA, Tuli Kupferberg and Me CIA Man, written by the late, great Tuli Kupferberg, is one of the Fugs‘ oldest songs. I first heard it live at the Harry Smith Memorial Concert in DC produced by the Smithsonian Institution…
Just posted. An excerpt: To be sure, the Post did the public a huge favor by showing, in excruciating detail, just how massive our secret government has become since 9/11, how far it spreads geographically across the country, and how…
By Tim Shorrock WASHINGTON, DC – Not long ago, as I was preparing an article on government contracting, I was given a tour of Northern Virginia by a friend who spent over a decade as an intelligence operative and another…
The New Orleans Times-Picayune and ProPublica today broke the story of the indictment of a former New Orleans resident charged with federal hate crimes “for his alleged role in a racially motivated shooting of three black men in the days…
A wonderful poem, dedicated to Gary Snyder and written just after Allen Ginsberg returned from a trip to Japan to visit Snyder, printed in Evergreen Review, 1967. This was my culture growing up. It was wondrous while it lasted: check…
With apologies to Prince Valiant, circa 1310
It’s been a long process, but I’ve made some real progress on rebuilding my website and making my work – on East Asia, Hurricane Katrina and the outsourcing of national security – more accessible. Welcome to my readers, far and…
My take on retired Air Force General James Clapper, who’s been appointed by President Obama to be Director of National Intelligence, from Foreign Policy in Focus. Clapper doesn’t lean toward either the Bush or Obama foreign policy agendas, nor does…
My tweet of the day @timothys: Rush Limbaugh calls the first black man elected president “boy.” To the racist white man, America is always Mississippi, circa 1962. (Thanks to the late, great Phil Ochs for the song).
Jeff Stein’s SpyTalk: CIA documents detail false predictions on Korea. In which SpyTalk actually advances the story by adding details from retired Army General John Wickham, who was the US commander in South Korea during and after the Kwangju Peoples’…
The Lasting Significance of Kwangju: Foreign Policy in Focus, June 1, 2010. Last month marked the 30th anniversary of the Kwangju Citizens’ Uprising in South Korea, a pivotal event that inspired the Korean democratic movement through its ultimate victory in…
This CIA report, dated June 1979, was probably written as background material for President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 visit to Seoul. It was obtained by Tim Shorrock under the Freedom of Information Act in 2006; the initial FOIA request to the…