Yellow Journalism of the Hearst Era Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century
There is a wise old maxim that says, “The first step on the road to wisdom is to call things by their right names.” So, let’s do that.
"Fake News" has been around a long while: The...
The tale of a Vegas gambler, failed politician, and professional Nazi groupie
The war in Ukraine has been a bonanza for grifters. From mercenaries and gun runners to OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and journalists, a bottomless well of western financing combined with a firehose stream of information both true and...
Even when the U.S. and Israel fired missiles and dropped bombs on the home of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his wife and other members of his family, killing more than 40 members of the leadership of Iran, senior Iranian officials had maintained that Iran would never develop...
On January 29th, The Washington Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale historian Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths.” In a key passage, the article reads:
Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity...
I had the great fortune recently of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians in Athens and with meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union has drafted, and will soon release, a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive...
On December 8th the Green’s nine-member Steering Committee, its administrative arm, released a press statement in support of mandatory Covid-19 jabs. In one fell swoop, it rebranded and denigrated the Greens to just another captive corporate political party that echoes the pharmaceutical industry’s narrative “your body, my choice”.
However, there...
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately for a new book I’m writing that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence or the CIA, and I stumbled upon the biography of Frank Mankiewicz, the former Robert F. Kennedy speechwriter, who apparently had been a “secret backchannel” between President...
In chaotic times like ours, it behooves us to practice proactive optimism, which is far more than infantile hope or pious faith.
Conscious, vigorous optimism is visionary and builds on our awareness of our human identity and dignity. It expresses our faith in humanity, our resolve to be morally and...
By now you have probably been told innumerable times by friends, colleagues and progressive commentators why holding your nose and voting for Joe Biden is absolutely necessary to save America from four more destructive years of Donald Trump.
I agree with all those voices. And I endorse all their reasons—which...
CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t
In a recent feature article in The New Yorker magazine, writer Amy Davidson Sorkin recalls the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1995 bill, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act.
One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan had...
