Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Founded by Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)
Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general who ran the NSA and then the CIA under George W. Bush. Bill Maher asked him about Donald Trump’s plans to, for example, kill the families of terrorists, and Hayden replied that the armed forces would refuse to obey unlawful orders.
This is (1) unsurprising (2) surprising and (3) significant.
Continue reading “Donald Trump, Michael Hayden, unlawful orders, and the Establishment”
The WASP aristocracy Joseph Epstein wants us to be nostalgic for never had the nerve to take on the FBI.
I’m chortling over the revelation that the mastermind of the group that burglarized the FBI office in Media, PA in 1971, stealing the documents that revealed the existence of COINTELPRO, was the late William Davidon, a Haverford professor of mathematical physics. I wasn’t close to Davidon, and I’m a little surprised that he had the capacity to organize and lead such an operation. I recall that there was some attempt to implicate him in supposed plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger, and at the time I thought it much more likely that Kissinger would have been involved in a plot to kidnap Davidon.
Continue reading “J. Edgar Hoover and the WASPocracy”