The death of Warren Hinckle, a journalist long forgotten outside San Francisco, brings back Ramparts magazine’s crowning moment, also one of crucial moments of postwar liberalism. At a stroke, in March, 1967, the presumptions of innocence by purportedly freedom-loving (albeit hawkish) prestigious intellectuals were stripped off. It turned out that the grand banquets and conferences with literary-and-other luminaries, the New York Times-reported cocktail parties, indeed the whole egghead-celebrity thing, was at base a CIA operation called, without irony, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The list of collaborators was a long one, but Mary McCarthy, Irving Kristol, Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook and the Trillings, Diana and Lionel, among the most famous Americans, with European stars including Isaiah Berlin and Arthur Koestler at the top (Hannah Arendt in both categories). The Partisan Review, Encounter and a considerable stream of literary or quasi-literary journals existed, as it turned out, with the help of intelligence-agency donations.
Assange
PsyOps to build case against Assad
The West doesn’t want to acknowledge it enabled, and sometimes directly supported, groups in Syria that use chemical weapons as a pretext to put the onus for this on the Assad government, says retired CIA and US State Department official Larry Johnson.
A joint investigation by the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) accuses the Syrian government of carrying out two chemical weapons attacks in the past two years, as well as ISIS for using mustard gas in one of them.
DA asks for small party support to win Ekhurhuleni mayorship
Johannesburg – The Democratic Alliance on Sunday offered to sweeten the deal for opposition parties in order to gain the mayorship in Ekurhuleni.
“Neither one of us [the ANC or DA] can form a majority local government, and will require the support of other parties,” said mayoral candidate Ghaleb Cachalia.
“We are therefore publicly making the following offer to all parties, including the AIC… [but] excluding the EFF who have elected to remain in cooperative and supportive opposition.
NPR Host Demands That Assange Do Something Its Own Reporters Are Told Never to Do
In a ten-minute interview aired Wednesday morning, NPR’s David Greene asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange five times to reveal the sources of the leaked information he has published on the internet.
A major tenet of American journalism is that reporters protect their sources. Wikileaks is certainly not a traditional news organization, but Greene’s persistent attempts to get Assange to violate confidentiality was alarming, especially considering that there has been no challenge to the authenticity of the material in question.
Africa Intelligence Leaks 