End of 2016 News | 38 comments (38 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: I'm no historian ... but (none / 0)

Regarding Allen Dulles from your linked article:

Ken Klippenstein: Would you call Dulles a psychopath?
David Talbot: My colleague who helped me research the book, Karen Croft, who actually studied psychology at Stanford, she immediately began to see him in those terms and I think I came around to that point of view. He certainly would send people to their deaths without a second thought. His own power and his own ambition were the most important things to him. He tells his mistress Mary Bancroft once, much to her horror, while they're in her bedroom, how he loved to see the little mice's necks get snapped when he set these traps for them. By little mice he meant the people who he was at odds with in his spy games.
So yeah, I do think there's definitely a psychopathic element to Allen Dulles. When I was researching this book and seeing how cold and calculating and ruthless he could be, the image that kept coming to mind was the Lannister family in "Game of Thrones."
Ken Klippenstein: The patriarch in particular - the similarities are striking!

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jan 8th, 2017 at 03:58:37 PM EST
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Re: I'm no historian ... but (4.00 / 2)

David Talbot was a founder and CEO of Salon.com. Even if the website is usually CT-sneering, they covered the book "The Devil's Chessboard" of their former boss:

An interview with him: "Every president has been manipulated by national security officials"

An excerpt from the book (on JFK assassination)

Also a few casual mentions in other articles, like

Read Stephen Kinzer's book "The Brothers," or my former boss David Talbot's forthcoming "The Devil's Chessboard," and you learn how CIA head Allen Dulles seduced many of the so-called great men of postwar American journalism, including Arthur Ochs Sulzberger of the New York Times, Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and almost every major political columnist, into becoming shills for hysterical anti-Communism and belligerent Cold War foreign policy. Judith Miller, the Times reporter and Bush administration stooge who did so much to drag us into the Iraq quagmire, is not nearly as much of an outlier as she seems. Miller was just an extreme example of the snuggly relationship with power, and the subtle but pervasive channeling of public discourse through well-worn grooves of accepted dogma, that has characterized mainstream journalism for decades.

A few other titles (about a year ago) from Salon.com

This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn't control

"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

The Cold War is back -- and it never went away: Bobby Fischer's tragedy and the conflict that ate America's soul

by das monde on Mon Jan 9th, 2017 at 04:55:53 AM EST
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Re: I'm no historian ... but (4.00 / 2)

This article from The New Republic adds to the collection:

Literary Agents -- Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA.

by das monde on Wed Jan 11th, 2017 at 11:33:36 AM EST
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End of 2016 News | 38 comments (38 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)