Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician, academic, and conspiracy theorist. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms in the United States House of Representatives. She was the first African American woman elected to represent Georgia in the House. She left the Democratic Party and ran in 2008 as the presidential nominee of the Green Party. She ran for vice president in 2020 after the Green Party of Alaska formally nominated her and draft-nominated Jesse Ventura for president. She is currently a professor in Political Science at North South University in Bangladesh.
In 2011, former Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party candidate for President, Cynthia McKinney, took a delegation of observers to Libya to monitor NATO's purported humanitarian intervention. Prefaced by Ramsey Clark, this collection of essays includes scholarly and legal analysis, as well as personal accounts by witnesses to the NATO assault on a helpless civilian population it had a UN mandate to protect, and the massive propaganda campaign that made it possible. It responds to the many questions left unanswered by a complicit mainstream media, such as: Why Libya, not Bahrain, Yemen or Egypt? What was life in Libya like under Qadhafi? What is the truth about the so-called "Black Mercenaries"? What was the role of Western NGOs and the International Criminal Court? What about Africom's Plans for Africa? What did it have to do with Liby'a independent central bank, its oil, its plans for an African currency, its efforts to free African states from the coils of the Bretton Woods Institutions? Cynthia McKinney and other contributors to this volume were in Libya during the period of the NATO bombardment of Libyan cities, and were among the few independent voices to report on the tragedy.