How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
Are We Witnessing a Coup Operation Against the Trump White House?
Our intelligence apparatus is doing far more than stoking paranoia about the Russian bogeyman—it’s threatening democracy. A couple of books come to mind amid the relentless leaks emanating from the spooks on either side of the Potomac and, not to…
This is how the CIA botched Iraq post-9/11: Bob Gates, careerist sycophancy, and the real history of the Deep State
A veteran CIA officer explains to Salon exactly where the agency has gone wrong for decades — and the consequences In a lengthy exchange with Ray McGovern, or when you listen to him speak, a lot comes at you. This…
“Intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill”: A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares
After almost 30 years in the CIA, Ray McGovern became a truth-teller. He sits down with Salon for a long debriefing I first heard Ray McGovern speak on a country road in the New England hills. This was courtesy of…
We are f***ing sadists: We are not decent, and we are not a democracy
The torture report requires us to look in the mirror — and accurately assess the monster that we see “You’ll comment on the torture report?” a friend in London asked just after the Senate’s revelations came out last week. “No,…
God won’t save us: Memorial Day, honest history and our new military-industrial complex
Americans believe we are guided by divine providence. Obama’s strange presidency shows the work of something else Memorial Day comes, always a curious occasion in a nation devoted to forgetting so much of its past. Count this column one among…
Liberal media myth officially dead: Brazen propaganda, historical amnesia and the New York Times
Does Obama have control of his own intelligence agencies? Also, the Times has an ironic definition of propaganda This shapes up as an important week in the Ukraine crisis. We have already witnessed the extent to which the provisional government…
Washington hates real democracy: The reality is worse than anything Robert Gates suggests
It’s deeper than Gates’ new book: We’ve no control over events, but — dangerously — keep pretending we do The third anniversary of the Arab Spring is upon us. Three years ago next week Tunisians toppled the crooked regime of…
Our Orwellian reality: Drone wars, surveillance, a lapdog media — and you
Our government lies to itself — and to us. Like Edward Snowden, it is time for us all to stand up for our values This column is not another look back, another of those tedious end-of-year rituals the very best…
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