In general, spying is boring. And for purposes of drama and what they’re doing, The Americans makes it be something different than that. For example, the most prominent real-life Russian illegal of the sort we see on the show was a guy named Rudolph Abel. He was a KGB colonel who was arrested in the late-fifties. And what he did was work in New York as a photographer. I think his apartment was in Brooklyn. And he didn’t kill anybody [laughs], he didn’t run around plotting this and that. He worked as a photographer and met his agents wherever he was supposed to, and in fact, his whole purpose was to remain anonymous.
READ ONCategory: LIES & PROPAGANDA
Of A Type Developed By Liars
CRAIG MURRAY—When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand.
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Trump Compromised by Russia?
STEPHEN LENDMAN—Media scoundrel Thomas Friedman: “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy…” Hot air produced by egomaniacs like this passes for cerebral punditry in the West.
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Lovefest in Korea Leaves US Regime Fuming
DAVID W. PEAR—Every four years the US regime uses the Olympics as an opportunity to rain chaos and hate during the Olympics’ historical tradition of bringing the world’s best athletes together in celebration of world unity, human dignity, fraternity among all nations and the possibilities when nations come together in peace. Happiness, unity and peace are a threat to the paranoid US regime, which is dedicated to war, death, and chaos. Like a drone hurling bombs at wedding parties and funerals, the unpredictable US regime tries to sabotage anything good and decent that might come from a peaceful gathering of nations.
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What ‘News’Media in U.S. and Allied Countries Never Report
ERIC ZUESSE—The ‘news’media in the U.S. and allied countries never report the corruption (including lying) perpetrated by any except the very few non-mainstream media that are authentically pro-democracy (or “anti-Establishment” or “anti-elitist” — which doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “anti-elite”) in those countries — and these few pro-democracy sites are the least-corrupt newsmedia, the few ones that are careful to report only truths — no lies, no propaganda at all.
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Hollywood’s Dangerous Afghan Illusion: “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Legacy of the late Robert Parry
ROBERT PARRY—First, there was the ascendance of propaganda over truth. The U.S. government was well aware of the gross human rights crimes of the Afghan “muj” but still sold them as honorable “freedom fighters” to the American people. Second, there was the triumphalism of Gates and other war hawks, who insisted on rubbing Moscow’s nose in its Afghan defeat and thus blocked cooperation on a negotiated settlement which held out the promise of a less destructive outcome.
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New York Times cashes in on Facebook’s news censorship
WILL MORROW—he Times and the Post have been at the forefront of the drive to censor the Internet. The Times continued its campaign in an op-ed by Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, published online yesterday. The column, “Russian trolls are only part of the problem,” openly admits that the effort to censor the Internet is not primarily about Russia.
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