What do people think of the online magazine "Salon"? I keep seeing people running it down on the DU.
But I like their articles. Not all of them. But many.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it's hard to take them seriously.
A real resource. Its founders are committed to excellence. The work, profound.
Look what David Talbot reported at the Passing the Torch conference at Duquesne in 2013:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024105197
As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend "Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" at Duquesne University.
One of the important speakers there was David Talbot, author of "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years." As the founder of Salon.com, the man of letters also understands new media and its import for democracy and our republic.
David Talbot did not mince words in his presentation at Duquesne. He publicly named former CIA director Allen Dulles not only as participant in the cover-up of events concerning CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy, Talbot said Dulles was the chief architect of the assassination.
Mr. Talbot has worked for more than two years on a book that I believe will shake the nation's financial and political establishment to its core. Here are Mr. Talbot's words, outlining why:
...I think what we're going to show over the next few years is that Allen Welsh Dulles was much more centrally involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, and its cover-up, than Lee Harvey Oswald.
Fifty years later, it's finally time to give the man his rightful place in history. In his day, Allen Dulles was America's most legendary spymaster, the longest-serving director of the CIA. He took great pleasure in regaling the public about his espionage triumphs. But, for obvious reasons, he could never take credit for his biggest and boldest covert operation:
the killing of the President of the United States in broad daylight on the streets of an American city.
I hope that my forthcoming book, which will be titled "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, JFK and the Epic Battle for America's Soul" will at long last give Mr. Dulles his due. As I say in my title of my remarks this morning, I believe Allen Dulles truly was the "Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Assassination."
In September 1965, nearly two years after Kennedy was violently removed from office, Allen Dulles went for a stroll near his home in Georgetown with a young magazine editor named William Morris. The old spymaster, long since retired, struck Morris as an amiable, avuncular character until the name Kennedy suddenly came up in the conversation. Suddenly a dark cloud crossed the old man's brow.
"That little Kennedy," he spat out. "He thought he was a god."
Allen Dulles knew who the true overlords of American power were. (They were) men like him and his brother, not Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The Kennedys were mere upstarts in comparison to the Dulles family. The Dulles dynasty boasted diplomats and international bankers and three secretaries of state. The Kennedy clan, by comparison, was distinguished by saloon keepers and ward healers. When paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy was amassing his fortune as a movie mogul and stock gambler, Dulles and his older brother were running Wall Street from their perch at the world's largest law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell and creating a new global financial order.
During the Cold War, President Eisenhower outsourced the country's foreign policy to the Dulles Brothers, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles serving as the architect of Washington's global crusade against communism, and Allen Dulles carrying out the darker chores of empire.
Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev who kept looking for a way out of the Cold War noose but found himself repeatedly checkmated by the Dulleses remarked at one point, "One shuddered at what great force was in the Dulles Brothers' hands."
The Dulles Brothers stood at the very apex of American power, straddling an elite network that connected Wall Street, Washington, big oil and international finance. John Foster Dulles was the ultimate counselor for that overworld that ruled the country's government and business, and his younger brother Allen was at privileged circles master of intrigue and subversion, its enforcer...
Mr. Talbot had a lot more to say about the Dulles Brothers, especially Allen Dulles as head of CIA. One of the most important things to remember, Dulles, even after he was out of office, continued to command the respect of people like James Jesus Angleton and Richard Helms, people he had promoted to their positions of power, and people who kept their knowledge of CIA assassination programs away from President Kennedy and the various government investigators who would later ask them about them.
Something I'm personally proud to add: Dulles and his brother are two of the main founders of the BFEE, a term Bartcop coined and I borrow to denote the War Party affiliated with the right wing Wall Street crowd that infested Washington for much of the late 19th and 20th century. Allen Dulles was a good friend and business associate of Prescott Sheldon Bush, Sr.
During the Depression, they tried to overthrow FDR. Before and during World War II, they did business with Hitler. After the war, they imported NAZIs to help fight the commies and build up a case for the Military Industrial Complex. They've done a lot since, from Vietnam to Iraq.
Where does Salon.com and DU fit in all of this? They serve to spread the truth about the government and how its secret services operate in service to wealth before service to the People. Which is democratic? Which is fascistic? Secret Government or Democracy?
Unlike CIABCNNBCBSFoxNoiseNutworks, David Talbot tells the truth. Allen Dulles, the man who headed the CIA and then lied to the Warren Commission, was a NAZI sympathizer.
Rupert Murdoch and friends in Corporate McPravda are ignoring what it means for how the Inited Stste has become a safe zone for traitors, warmongers, and plutocrats.
“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”
From World War II though JFK, "The Devil's Chessboard" explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites
LIAM O'DONOGHUE
Salon.com, Oct. 15, 2015
This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.
This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze (former CIA director) Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”
Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.
Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”
By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable. “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”
CONTINUED...
It's connecting the dots the CIA Controlled & Corporate Owned News will never mention, even if their secret Swiss bank accounts depended on it.
That should be of interest to anyone wondering why the middle class has disappeared, banksters and traitors who lied America into war walk free, and their profitable wars without end consume the nation's treasure.
David Talbot talks with Mother Jones about the book we talked about on DU in 2013:
You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.
In a new book, David Talbot makes the case that the CIA head under Eisenhower and Kennedy may have been a psychopath.
—By Aaron Wiener
MotherJones | Sat Oct. 10, 2015
"What follows," David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil's Chessboard, "is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar." Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn't deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.
Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today's government intelligence overreach.
SNIP...
MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles' childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?
DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles's biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn't explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.
They've done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him "the Shark." His favorite word was whether you were "useful" to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.
There's a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles's knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.
MJ: I'm interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?
DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It's this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don't make sense in today's ruthless world.
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/book-review-devils-chessboard-david-talbot
