STEVE WEISSMAN—”Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he’s told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator,” laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. “It used to be the CIA doing these things,” he tells Democracy Now. “I know that for a fact.” Now it’s the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Land of False Idols: Ben Bradlee’s Not Such ‘A Good Life’
45 minutes readJAMES DiEUGENIO—If the relationship with Kennedy brought Bradlee prestige and status in the world of journalism, the deal he helped broker for Newsweek made him filthy rich for life. Phil Graham rewarded him with a finder’s fee: not in cash, but in Post stock options. The stock of the Post company would soon skyrocket, especially after it went public in 1971. As Bradlee once said, Graham’s generosity made him a millionaire many times over. He ended up buying a house that occupied almost an entire city block, while he owned another in the Hamptons.
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ARCHIVES: Serb Demonization as Propaganda Coup
21 minutes readED HERMAN—The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.