Annie Machon
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to help blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public speaker, writer, media pundit, and political campaigner. She has a rare perspective both on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies, the media, and digital rights, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness and accountability in both public and private sectors.
Mo Stewart
Mo Stewart is a former healthcare professional, a female disabled veteran and, since 2009, has researched the influence of corporate America with future UK welfare reforms. Mo is the lead independent researcher in the UK who exposed the long-standing plan to demolish the UK welfare state, to be eventually replaced with private healthcare insurance as successive UK governments were guided by Unum Insurance since 1992. She exposed the assessment used by the UK government to resist funding welfare benefit to those in greatest need as being dangerous and bogus, and her research is sought by a variety of universities throughout the UK.
Mo provides powerful evidence of the long-standing assault on disability rights, which has resulted in thousands of deaths of those least able to defend themselves, and her research has been quoted during debates in the House of Lords, the House of Commons and Westminster Hall yet is something that the entire national press have resisted publishing. Her book ‘Cash Not Care – the planned demolition of the UK welfare state’ was published in September 2016 and has gained critical acclaim from academics and the disabled community.
Mark Curtis
Mark Curtis is an author and consultant. He is a former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales, Paris and the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartige Politik, Bonn.
Mark is a former Director of the World Development Movement (now called Global Justice Now), Head of Global Advocacy and Policy at Christian Aid and Head of Policy at ActionAid.
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning 16-year investigative journalist and creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project. He is ‘System Shift’ columnist at VICE’s Motherboard.
His work has been published in The Guardian, VICE, Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, Raw Story, New Internationalist, Huffington Post UK, Al-Arabiya English, AlterNet, The Ecologist, and Asia Times, among other places.
Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s ‘Top 1,000’ list of most influential people in London.
Paul Larudee
Paul Larudee is a former Fulbright-Hays lecturer and US government advisor in the Middle East, a co-founder of the Syria Solidarity Movement, a major figure in the pro-Palestinian movement and the International Solidarity Movement.” Larudee is a co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement, which achieved official recognition by the United Nations in 2011. Larudee was a member of the U.S. delegation aboard the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was attacked by Israeli forces on May 31, 2010, where IDF subjected him to “multiple beatings in two days of captivity in Israel.
Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D
Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., a native of Japan, is a columnist, researcher, and the First Amendment advocate. She has been covering issues of free speech, transparency and the vital role of whistleblowers in global society. Her writing has appeared on diverse outlets such as Counterpunch, CommonDreams, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Global Research and Antiwar.com. Her work has been published in the At Issue Series; The Occupy Movement by Greenhaven Press, Global Issues, Local Arguments by Pearson Education and Krytyka Polityczna Global Activism by Autonome Universität Berlin. She is a guest writer at Falkvinge &Co. on Infopolicy, where she explores the role that Bitcoin and other decentralized platforms play in strengthening civil liberties. Twitter:@nozomimagine.
John Whitehead
John Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights in the USA. Whitehead’s concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization whose international headquarters are located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Whitehead serves as the Institute’s president and spokesperson, in addition to writing a weekly commentary that is posted on The Rutherford Institute’s website (www.rutherford.org), as well being distributed to several hundred newspapers, and hosting a national public service radio campaign. Whitehead’s aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties issues has earned him numerous accolades, including the Hungarian Medal of Freedom. Articles by Whitehead have been printed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, among others.
Rick Sterling
Rick Sterling is a former aerospace engineer, now an investigative journalist, focusing especially on the Middle East. He grew up in Vancouver Canada but now lives in the San Francisco East Bay, California. Rick has worked with progressive movements in Africa and Latin America as well as the Middle East. He has done research and writing on the corporatization of education within the USA as well as international struggles for independence and self-determination.
Felicity Arbuthnot
Felicity Arbuthnot is a British freelance journalist who has visited Iraq dozens of times since the 1991 Gulf War. She has written and broadcast widely on Iraq, one of the few journalists to cover Iraq extensively even in the mid-1990’s during the sanctions and reporting on the devastating effects that took place prior to America’s attack that killed over one million civilians.
Felicity worked as senior researcher on John Pilger’s film “Paying the Price — Killing the Children of Iraq”, which investigated and told the story of the devastating effects of the United Nations sanctions on people of Iraq.
She is also the author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of published Baghdad in the educational Great Cities of the World Series for World Almanac Library and Denis Halliday Returns for RTE (Ireland.) Felicity is a regular contributor to the New Internationalist, The London Progressive Journal, Global Research, Dissident Voice and many well known and respected news outlets and was nominated for the Lorenzo Natali Award for Human Rights Journalism.
Chris Cole
Chris Cole is a former Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and co-ordinator of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). For the past four years, Chris has been researching and campaigning on the issue of armed drones. He is a co-author of Convenient Killing: Armed Drones and the Playstation Mentality (2010), secretary of the Drones Campaign Network and maintains the internationally respected Drone Wars UK website (www.dronewars.net). Chris regularly speaks to conferences, public meetings and the media on drones and the growth of remote warfare.
Drone Wars UK provides information and comment on the growing use of armed drones. As we are based in the UK we focus on the use of British drones but also include information about armed drones in general.
Chris has also been imprisoned a number of times for nonviolent direct action against war and war preparations. He lives with his wife, Virginia, and their three children in Oxford.
Robert Woodward
TruePublica Editor: Robert Woodward’s journalistic interests are political corruption, money laundering, surveillance and the decline of democracy. In addition, he works closely with civil liberty and human rights organisations. Due to the nature of his work, Robert keeps a low profile on social media and does not engage in open networks.
Robert is accredited with collating information and helping journalists with news stories around the brewing scandal of how democracies in the West are being bought by billionaires, how democracies are being dismantled by the vested interests of corporations and exposing corrupt politicians.
Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has also contributed chapters and essays to several edited volumes on Israel-Palestine.
In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. The judges’ citation reads: “Jonathan Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East.” The same year, Project Censored voted a report by Jonathan, “Israel brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank”, one of the most important stories censored in 2009-10.
Jonathan’s reports and commentaries have appeared in the many newspapers such as the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and the New Statesman (London)to name just a few. He has contributed to many online sites, such as CounterPunch, Israeli Occupation Archive, Al-Jazeera.com and Electronic Intifada. He has been a senior consultant and lead writer on two major reports by the International Crisis Group, a leading think-tank based in Washington and Brussels dealing with conflict resolution.
Visit Jonathan Cook’s website HERE
Craig Murray
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. He joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and held various positions of seniority from London to West Africa
From 2002-2004 Craig was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. While Ambassador in Tashkent, Uzbekistan he accused the Karimov administration of human rights abuses, which he argued was a step against the wishes of the British government and the reason for his removal. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002 and again in early 2003, and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda was unreliable, immoral and illegal, as it was thought to have been obtained through torture. He described this as “selling our souls for dross”. He was subsequently removed from his ambassadorial post on 14 October 2004.
John Pilger
John Pilger became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. He became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the US, he marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.
His work in South East Asia and world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s reign was iconic. He has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary.
His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He writes a regular column for the New Statesman, London.
Thomas Helm
Thomas Helm is a writer and journalist specialising in globalisation, human rights, social issues and inequality. He has worked as a journalist for the Kashmir Observer, in Kashmir, India and for the International Service of Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. He is proficient in four languages: French, Italian, Spanish and English and has recently completed a masters in journalism at the University of Barcelona in collaboration with the University of Columbia, New York.
In 2011 Thomas graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with a BA in English Literature. One of his final essays, a study of the representation of war in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, was shortlisted for the Undergraduate of the Year Award. In addition to journalism, Thomas is an avid writer of fiction. his debut play “A Night of Solitude” ran for five nights at the Player’s Theatre, Dublin. in 2013 The Ilumino di Meno theatre festival in Italy selected “Stories of Exile and Movement” for performance.
He currently writes for Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. Visit his website thomasdhelm.wordpress.com
Robert J Burrowes
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981.
He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolenceand ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach’ http://www.sunypress.edu/p-217
André Vltchek
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.
ANDRE VLTCHEK is one of this world’s greatest contemporary thinkers. A true internationalist, he does not belong to any single culture; he belongs to a world battered by Western imperialism and capitalist fundamentalism. That is why he works relentlessly and courageously at the front lines and battlefields, as well as in the most forgotten corners of the globe; wherever he is needed and wherever our humanity is suffering, struggling and is rising to its feet.
Peter Koenig
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources.
He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites.
He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.
He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship. Dr. Roberts was associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.
President Reagan appointed Dr. Roberts Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. After leaving the Treasury, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce. He is listed as one of the ten most influential people in Alternative Media. To read more about Paul Craig Roberts go to paulcraigroberts.org
Colin Todhunter
Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and former social policy researcher. His work has been extensively published both online and in the print media. Although he writes on a wide range of issues, his main area of concern involves how large corporations, especially transnational agribusiness, have captured key international and national institutions to undermine indigenous models of agriculture.
The net outcome has been a distorted mainstream narrative that attempts to legitimise a ‘development’ model that is exploitative, unsustainable and geopolitical in nature. Originally from the UK, Colin has spent many years in India, where he wrote for various newspapers, most notably the Bangalore-based Deccan Herald for 10 years. To find out more, go to colintodhunter.com
Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring and started writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005.
In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. sjlendman.blogsot.com
Graham Vanbergen
Graham Vanbergen is the founder and contributing editor of TruePublica.org.uk. He is also a featured permanent columnist for The European Financial Review and The World Financial Review and regularly contributes to other internationally recognised news outlets.
Graham specialises in explaining the failing and damaging transnational corporate systems that seeks to dismantle real democracy and capitalism in the West. Graham is also the founder of NewsPublica – an independent news and journalism aggregator, and ThinkPublica – a blog/thinktank with creative ideas for Britain in a world where extravagant socialism and extreme capitalism have demonstrated their inadequacy in the 21st century.
Previously, Graham worked within the residential investment industry for over two decades at senior executive and board level for some of the worlds biggest financial, property and insurance institutions such as Nationwide Building Society, General Accident Insurance, Hambros Bank and Countrywide plc.
