The Intercept
April 6, 2016
ONE OF THE intellectual gargoyles that has crawled out of Donald Trump’s brain is the idea that we should “open up” libel laws to make it easier to punish the media for negative or unfair stories. Trump also wants top officials to sign nondisclosure agreements, ...
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
What the Guilty Verdict of Radovan Karadzic Tells Us About War Crimes After 9/11
The Intercept
March 24, 2016
WHEN I FIRST MET RADOVAN KARADZIC, he seemed more of a well-dressed buffoon than a major war criminal. Tall and blustery, with wavy hair and double-breasted suits, he made outlandish statements that few people took at face value. His prior achievements, such ...
’13 Hours’ Splashes Blood Across the Screen and Misses the Real Story of Benghazi
The Intercept
January 14, 2016
Would you give the story of Benghazi to the producer of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Someone did. The result is the new film directed by Michael Bay, 13 Hours, which makes Rambo look like War and Peace.
In 13 Hours, Bay displays a fetish for fake blood and heads ...
Homeland Goes Rogue Against the Espionage Act
The Intercept
November 10, 2015
On Sunday evening, at around 9:30, a senior CIA official committed an egregious violation of the Espionage Act, leaking a cache of secret cables to someone who did not have clearance to receive them. The official now stands in breach of a draconian law ...
Firing Blind: Flawed Intelligence and the Limits of Drone Technology
The Intercept
Oct. 15, 2015
This article was co-authored with Cora Currier and is part of a series of stories, The Drone Papers, that The Intercept published based on secret military documents. For a version of this story with links to the source documents, please click here.
The Obama administration ...
Bard College
Tivoli, NY
Interview Edward Snowden (via video link from Russia).
How the Makers of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Seduced the CIA with Fake Earrings
The Intercept
September 9, 2015
The plot behind the plot of Zero Dark Thirty just gets better and better.
From the moment it premiered in 2012, the film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been criticized as pro-torture propaganda. According to its many detractors, ...
The Philosopher of Surveillance
The Intercept
What Happens When a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy?
August 11, 2015
ARE YOU THE SOCRATES of the National Security Agency?
That was the question the NSA asked its workforce in a memo soliciting applications for an in-house ethicist who would write a philosophically minded column about ...
Benghazi Film by Michael Bay Could Be Next ‘American Sniper’ but Let’s Hope Not
The Intercept
July 30, 2015
Hollywood surprised itself earlier this year by producing an Iraq war movie that was a blockbuster—American Sniper has earned more than half a billion dollars so far, starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. The film also produced intense ...
How Jeffrey Sterling Took On the CIA—and Lost Everything
The Intercept
June 18, 2015
THIS IS HOW it ended for Jeffrey Sterling.
A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for the next ...