On Killing Hope and U.S. Imperialism

"William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam.

He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first ’underground’ newspaper in the capital.

In 1969, he wrote and published an expose of the CIA in which was revealed the name and addresses of more than 200 employees of the Agency.

Mr Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe, and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-1973, writing about the Allende government’s "socialist experiment", and then its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various corners of the world. In the mid 1970’s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.

The late 1980s found Mr. Blum living in Los Angeles pursuing a career as a screenwriter. Unfortunately, his screenplays all had two (if no three) strikes against them because they dealt with those things which make grown men run screaming in Hollywood: ideas and issues.

In 1999, he was one of the recipients of Project Censored’s awards for "exemplary journalism" for writing one of the top ten censored stories of 1998, an article on how, in the 190s, the United States gave Iraq the material to develop a chemical and biological warfare capability.

Blum’s articles have appeared in The Ecologist, Z Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly, Counterpunch, Lobster, National Catholic Reporter, The Progressive, the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications."

One can find excerpts from Killing Hope here:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/KillingHope_page.html

William Blum’s website: Killinghope.org