human rights

Wall Street Journal quotes Dr Waller on genocide trial

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The Wall Street Journal quoted Professor Waller in an article about a Guatemalan court’s decision to overturn the genocide conviction of a former Guatemalan dictator. The rushed trial of 86 year-old Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17 years in 1982-83, resulted in a verdict of crimes against humanity and genocide. The trial was controversial from … Read more

Public diplomacy: ‘Medicine is the universal language’

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by J Michael Waller / Serviam / September-October 2008 Serviam’s person of the year, Project HOPE President and CEO John P. Howe III, MD, champions the military’s new humanitarian partnerships with businesses and charities, and comments on the role of health NGOs in global stability operations. Serviam Editor J. Michael Waller interviewed Dr. Howe in September 2008. Download … Read more

Introduction to dismantling a secret police state

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Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council and J. Michael Waller edited a series of articles on the legacies of totalitarian secret police systems. Those articles were published in August, 2004, in Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. Berman and Waller co-wrote the following introduction to the series: When a totalitarian group seizes power, whether by parliamentary maneuver or … Read more

Tropical chekists: The Sandinista secret police legacy in Nicaragua

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by J. Michael Waller Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Summer 2004 As a revolutionary regime, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that overthrew strongman Anastasio Somoza in 1979 swept away all vestiges of the old order. Virtually every single government structure, including the constitution, judiciary, legislature, and all instruments of security and force, was … Read more

Blinded vigilance: How Deutch and Tenet helped weaken CIA prior to 9/11

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by J. Michael Waller, Insight magazine, October 15, 2001 While the terrorists and their sponsors were plotting to hijack airliners and crash them into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon, senior CIA officials were compelling analysts and operations officers to attend sensitivity-training classes and sew diversity quilts. That is a fact. It also is a metaphor for why … Read more

Yeltsin keeps it all in the family (on the rise of Putin)

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by J Michael Waller, Insight, September 6, 1999 Download PDF: IM Rise of Putin 1999.09.06 Boris Yeltsin has named the head of the secret police, Vladimir Putin, as his latest prime minister, raising fundamental concerns about the direction Russia is taking. As a KGB officer he oversaw the Stasi secret police in Communist East Germany. He led … Read more

Russia’s security services: A checklist for reforms

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by J Michael Waller, Perspective (Boston University, Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy), Vol. VII, No. 1, September-October 1997. Protection of human rights, according to Russian law, is the first duty of the security and intelligence services of the post-Soviet state. Even more, the “special services” or “organs,” as they are called, … Read more

Supreme Soviet investigation of the 1991 coup: The suppressed transcripts

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In 1995-96 we published the only translated transcripts of the Russian parliamentary investigation hearings on the 1991 putsch. To our knowledge, the transcripts were never published in Russia. Dr Waller edited a selection of the transcripts for Demokratizatsiya. The journal, then published in cooperation with the American University and Moscow State University, is now housed … Read more