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During the Cold War the operations division (DO) of the CIA overthrew elected governments and supported brutal dictators, but the analytic division (DI) maintained a reputation for producing objective reports, such as those debunking President Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric and President Lyndon Johnson’s assumption that bombing in Viet Nam would be effective1. Under President Ford, […]

A fever took Helen Keller’s sight and hearing at the age of one-and-a-half. On March 3, 1887, when Keller was six, a teacher, Anne Sullivan, came to stay at her house. Sullivan taught Keller language by spelling into her hand. Keller wrote about the first word that she understood1: I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant […]

Soon after the horror of World War II and the Nazi atrocities that came to be known as The Holocaust, 51 countries formed the United Nations to keep peace and security. Soon after that, on December 10th, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights1. That document includes many of the rights […]

The Nuremberg trials for massive crimes committed during World War II led to the opening of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) over fifty years later1. The first trial aimed to hold to account German Nazi leaders, who started the western part of the war, which killed three percent of the world’s people2. Ten million […]

George W. Bush made false claims citing faulty intelligence, during his campaign in 2002 to gain public and congressional support for an invasion of Iraq1. The faulty intelligence came through the “stovepipes” Bush’s administration set up to pump information from the intelligence gatherers directly up to the policy makers, bypassing the intelligence analysts2. The policy […]