A CIA calendar the CIA gift shop refuses to sell | Hacker News Reader

A CIA calendar the CIA gift shop refuses to sell

washingtonpost.com

132 pointsbenologist104 comments

It would be interesting to gain some professional insight on what's happening here, as I (like several other responders) find this article somewhat objectionable. The story that is presented literally ends with these words:

> the gift shop can’t sell the calendar because "it’s not an official work of the U.S. government

There's no need for punctuation, no need to close the quote. The story is over.

There's still a question in my mind, though, about how this came to pass. Looking at the story closely, it appears to largely consist of a human interest filler piece on one particular man's hobby devotion to the CIA, as well as the sentimentality of several former operatives; actually, I imagine some frowns at the CIA to see the story being published, because it looks awfully like a major national newspaper known for investigative journalism doing a favour to former (and possibly current) CIA employees by publicizing their pet project.

I don't have the experience to look at an article and recognize what it was meant to be, but the structure seems very awkward, and I am wondering if we are seeing a story that just turned out to be meaningless and was published anyway (the gift shop refusal) or a rather boring (to anyone without a 'patriotic'-type interest in the CIA) human interest piece that was unwisely and badly rearranged to justify a clickbait title.

Knowledgeable replies would be very welcome. I am willing to say things that are wrong if that would help inspire you.

The article goes on for many paragraphs after the end you saw. I think your browser/add-ons are incompatible withthe website.

speaking of WaPo running CIA PR, from today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/27/...

The Washington Post does a lot of favors they don't publicize. For example, this: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699

They made an arrangement with the WaPo to quietly add DNC donors to the party invite list. They wanted to put that on their donor price sheets, but the lawyers wouldn't allow it. It's not clear how or why this kind of stealthy donation of services from the WaPo to the DNC was better.

At this point I don't even click on WaPo links anymore even when the headlines sound interesting. Their one sided political ideologism makes the most politics-free stories into left-wing manifestos.

I think that's actually a really good article, thanks for posting it!

> There's no need for punctuation, no need to close the quote. The story is over.

Huh? That's NOT the end of the article.

Worse, somehow your comment is the most upvoted???

I think it would be interesting and heartbreaking to view this calendar. The CIA is not the noble intelligence agency that's sold to the world. There is testimony given before congress that confirms they have injected propaganda into major magazines for decades and they have refused to answer any questions about TV propaganda.

> Flip to April for “The First Sting,” depicting a CIA-trained Afghan mujahideen striking Soviet helicopters with a Stinger missile.

The mujahideen was created when the US convinced Egypt to release their criminals (murders, rapists, some political prisoners) and let them gain freedom by fighting a war in Afghanistan. That's where you get the Taliban. Also in case anyone has forgotten, the US is still bombing Afghanistan. Their civilian population is terrified of drones. It's been the longest military campaign by the US ever. (see the BBC documentary: The Power of Nightmares)

The Taliban didn't rise out of the mujahideen. The Taliban started essentially as a grassroots movement by students. There's even mujihadeen who later fought the Taliban.

The Taliban was a response (and therefore inspired and motivated by) the mujahideen, no? So if there were no extremist mujahideen, there'd be no extremist Taliban response.

> The mujahideen was created when the US convinced Egypt to release their criminals (murders, rapists, some political prisoners) and let them gain freedom by fighting a war in Afghanistan.

So, Soviets invading the Afghanistan wasn't responsible for anything?

Also I'd like to see some sources.

> The mujahideen was created when the US convinced Egypt to release their criminals (murders, rapists, some political prisoners) and let them gain freedom by fighting a war in Afghanistan.

That is a theory I have never come across before. Can you point me to the book or article that you got that idea from?

I'd start with the BBC documentary: "The Power of Nightmares." It comes in three parts and covers the entire cold war era up to the early 2000s.

You may also want to read up on Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss.

> The CIA is not the noble intelligence agency that's sold to the world

Huh? I think most people think of the CIA in the opposite way. That CIA is a byword for perfidiousness.

I myself think the CIA is very much a net good if only for the reason that every country has an equivalent (or would have if they could afford too).

Of course it's not perfect but like any large organisation it has its secrets and skeletons in the closet.

This post[1] about the CIA gift shop was far more interesting to me.

[1]http://savageminds.org/2013/11/13/made-in-china-notes-from-t...

I'm hopeful that after the Washington Post hires the 5 dozen additional reporters it plans to add in 2017, readers will again see real investigative journalism. The hard-hitting reporting of the 1970's and 80's has been replaced by opinion pieces masquerading as journalism and puff pieces like this.

No doubt. I subscribed to WaPo in hopes of finding a politically neutral (or at least, balanced) paper that focused on real news and not political opinion and crap. The last year, however, has been dreadful for that paper. It feels like 80% of the first page of front page content has been anti-Trump opinion pieces.

I want to read about the war in Syria, ISIS, finance, the American economy, and technology. This stuff should be the mainstay of any U.S. paper.

Do you recommed another paper I can subscribe to that tries to reports more neutral?

English version of al jazeera has good info on ISIS/Syria/North Africa. Not without it's own biases, but definitely more in depth topics than we get in western papers.

al jazeera wears their biases on their sleeve, when I read something from them I know to read it with the understanding that its from the Qatar state-run media outlet. My primary issue with outlets like WaPo is that they pretend to be objective journalism while publishing rather blatant propaganda pieces. Same reason why I can (and do) read sites like breitbart, they don't pretend to be objective news sources.

I sometimes watch their news channel, but not very often.

Out of curiosity, can you point our their bias regarding Qatar? What kind of bias I should be aware of when watching them?

I don't have time or interest to dig into Qatars politics, but maybe you can give some hints what to look forward, since you sound like someone who knows the deal.

I sure wish I had one to recommend. I asked this question on Facebook last year and got a bunch of good responses from some friends:

* The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

* Wall Street Journal

* BBC

* Christian Science Monitor

The Economist is not particularly left-leaning - they're quite in favor of free markets and a light regulatory touch for many things.

The Financial Times is another good one.

I mostly agree, but I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump. Hardly a piece on the site that I RECALL had anything positive to say about the Brexit, Trump, or other movements. I like to read positive and negatives for both. Overall, a good site/magazine.

Better to say that The Economist is pro-globalism, right or left.

Yeah maybe that's more accurate, depending on what you mean by globalism.

guess that depends on your definition of globalism.

the economist is pro imf/world bank.

that is less pro globalisation and more pro * poorer nations for the Western profit incentive.

which isnt quite an equivalence.

Isofar as "left" and "right" have meaning, globalism is right, not left. A "left" globalism would be an international workers/labor movement, which Economist does not support.

> I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump

Could be, there's a reason for that. With some things, the two sides do not really merit the same consideration. Slavery, for instance is an easy one, not something where you need 'fair and balanced' coverage of 'both sides of the issue'. Not comparing Trump to slavery, mind you, but from their editorial stance, he combines a number of worryingly illiberal qualities that are antithetical to their position. They were (and are) the same way about Silvio Berlusconi, despite not having a lot in common with some of his past left-wing opposition.

Of course. I just would prefer a little more opposition to the liberal imperialism at times. It would be great to have a journal that's somehow even more sophisticated than the Economist, taking into different viewpoints and understandings of the world. Just as a quick example, I don't see much in the way of opposition to war, or the positive side of something like charter schools. Note that these are things I'm just interested in reading contrasting viewpoints about. I am fortunate enough though that I can find books to fill these voids.

> positive side of something like charter schools

The Economist certainly have done this, they used to do one every few months. It's strange, I'd say charter schools were a very "neoliberal" policy.

Yeah these were just examples. Might not have been good ones.

propublica.org

It's hard to call them "news", but they do important research and expose

The alleged positives of Brexit have the problem of being incoherent: because there's no fixed policy manifesto for it, people keep citing conflicting advantages. Such as ending agricultural subsidies - while telling the farmers that they're not going to lose out.

Noam Chomsky said the FT is the only paper that tells the truth, since the interests of the readers and the publication are aligned in making money. One thing I read from Superforecasters though is that the best forecasters read a vast array of sources, actively challenging their own biases. It seemed that the most realistic perspective was not to be found in any one newspaper.

I suspect that Chomsky was taking a swipe at aleged money-grubbing readers, but I agree. It's refreshing to read their advertising charter.

http://aboutus.ft.com/corporate-information/ft-company/adver...

(Yes, people don't like paying a fee and seeing ads, but (a) that's reality and (b) the complaints are an arbitrary binary viewpoint that lacks foundation)

Are you certain it was FT that Chomsky said that about? He's said something nearly identical about WSJ in an article I read a few months ago

Look at some of the writers' twitter streams. Incredibly far-left invective. The paper itself is progressive-left but their true opinions shine through sometimes taking it a bit farther left than that. Great weekly read though overall.

It's a sad state of affairs when the Economist, the mouthpiece of globalized freemarketeer elites, can be nonchalantly branded "left-leaning". Left of whom, Darth Vader?

Left of Brietbart, which is now the standard template for the right. Overton window, ho!

I can see how the Economist might be described as liberal by a European, but they are decidedly not left-leaning. I would say that they are right-leaning even by American standards.

Mostly they are pro free trade free enterprise more than right wing, left wing. So when the left is pro trade, it would appear they are left leaning, when their position coincides with right aisle politics, they appear right wing. In other words, economics colours their perspective rather than politics but it can appear to be the opposite.

Great suggestions of course. I too take issue with calling The Economist "left-leaning". If you'd have said "liberal" (as in Liberal Democracy) I would accept that.

> The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

The Economist's mission statement is, almost literally, to advance neoliberal (unrelated to the canonical American definition of 'liberal') thought and policies across the globe. Any further to the right, and you would be in the territory of Mises/Friedman/Hayek, with privatized roads and 'gold standards'.

We live in a time when people who are to the right of Reagan are at times described un-ironically as "liberal".

It concerns me that people can consider the economist "left-leaning", it shows how far to the right the U.S. (and with it much of the world) has shifted.

The U.S. was way ahead of the rest of the world on this, and has always been a lot more conservative than Europe, but it's cultural influence has had the effect of moving Europe to the right by painting the middle ground as "left wing" so Europe makes concessions on things like privatisation of infrastructure (e.g. for better or worse privatisation of telecommunications in Europe in the 80s was pushed by the US).

It hasn't been all bad of course, part of the reason the recent election result is so painful is because progressive poltics has made a huge amount of progress.

In 25 years the US has gone from racist, homophobic and dealing with the effects of prohibition (the "war on drugs") to the society we have now which is dealing with it's issue of race far better than Europe (which continues to bury it's head in the sand over the issue), allowing gay marriage, serving in the military regardless of (open) sexual preference, and de-criminalising or legalising cannabis.

The US has faced up and is dealing with it's racism problem. Europe always saw itself as "nowhere near as bad as the US", which was true when the US had lynchings. And there is still plenty of work to the done in the US particularly around the justice system and other institutional effects which lead back to social injustice. But the trajectory is there for the US, while in Europe it feels like racism is a growing problem which isn't being tackled at all.

So it's understandable that people who were already set in their ways 25 years ago (indeed many current voters were approaching retirement 25 years ago) see the modern world and react with horror at all the progress.

Trump said he's going to "win so much we'll be sick and tired of winning", well Trump isn't a winner, progressives should be shouting that Trump is weak if he's tired of winning because he's won an election or two, because progressives have been winning for 25 years and we're not going to get tired of winning any time soon.

So the dramatic shift to the right has to been in context. The sky isn't going to fall but while huge progress has been made on social issues; on issues such as economic policy, policing and commercial rights there has been a slow constant erosion and shift to the right.

So the shift to the right socially is dangerous because reversing canoe from paddling upstream against a right-wing under-current will act as an enabler where you can quickly find yourself in shit creek without a paddle.

"Liberal" means different things in Europe and the US. In Europe, it's more along the lines of "classic liberal", which is not left-leaning, particularly, although The Economist does espouse some things that some elements of the left in the US do, such as legalization of drugs and gun control. They have also endorsed Democrats in the presidential elections, such as Hillary, as well as Republicans, in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

It's perfectly possible to disagree with them on a variety of issues, but pigeonholing them as 'left' or 'right' is inaccurate.

Of course, progressive politics of the kind you talk about is entirely compatible with neoliberalism. So to the extent that the Left is primarily focused on those things and demands that people subsume other concerns to them, it ceases to provide any opposition to neoliberalism. Which is why the Economist can be described as left-leaning - the world hasn't shifted to the right, though that's a convenient way for the people on the left who've abandoned these causes to shift blame elsewhere, instead the axis along which the two are divided is twisting sideways.

> * The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

-With all due respect, calling The Economist left-leaning makes about as much sense as calling Marx a right deviationist.

On the assumption that your comment is sincere - what would, in your book, be an example of a neutral or even right-leaning newspaper? (I am genuinely curious)

The word everyone is looking for here is "libertarian".

Even that's not a perfect fit, though, as they support things like gun control that would send many libertarians in the US into fits of sputtering rage.

Try Al Jazeera English.

It's not completely without bias (no one is, especially the BBC running scared of their own shadow post-Hutton), but it is a good place to find other points of view and shows some incredible documentaries and highlights some stories from around the world that western news channels just ignore either because of cost, because they are beholden to corporate sponsors or because it's just not entertaining enough.

As with the BBC, having state sponsorship can actually work well to provide funding to fill in the gaps that market-driven news leaves behind.

Yes, it happens that the country sponsoring Al Jazeera is a piece of shit for human rights and democracy but this isn't reflected in the output of AJE which feels like it has a good degree of editorial independence. It's not Russia Today by any means.

So state propaganda sources are better and make you feel like you know something? Got it.

Al Jazeera is anti-Israel and Anti-Russia for the most part because of Qatar's foreign policy interests.

BBC is anti-Russia, but more neutral on other issues.

News sources that don't get described as "anti-Israel and Anti-Russia" are almost certainly untrustworthy. The question is whether they also are willing to cover the west negatively where appropriate too.

Sure. Like Saudi Arabia, Arab Emirates and Ukraine. When all of those have negative stories about them I'm sold.

Haaretz and Moscow Times often post stories critical of their governments' actions. I know it's easier to make blanket statements to form an effective filter in the modern deluge of information, but it's not enough. I guess there are worse optimizations to make.

RT is anti AJ and BBC, and you can see Chomsky there.

Al Jazeera English is a good news source. It definitely goes off the rails with its opinion pages, but its investigative journalism is top-notch. It's probably good to consume it with BBC, NPR, Foreign Policy, Moscow Times, and the National Review to get a good basket of viewpoints.

I would say The Intercept is pretty "neutral" - but less in the "we don't take anyone's or anything's side, ever" (a mantra the NYT also abandoned in 2012, because it found it lacking - like with climate change, etc) sense, and more in the "holding government (whichever it may be) accountable for wrongdoing" sense, which I think is the original purpose of the media (or at least the purpose most democracies attribute to the media, even if that's not true in many cases anymore).

I thought this article described rather well the main problem with the media today and how it could get back on the right path:

https://popehat.com/2016/12/15/deserving-trust/

The mainstream media is just as responsible for the rise of fake news as anything else, if not more so. If it didn't give people a reason to distrust it as acting not out of principle, but out of love for a certain faction of the government, perhaps fake news wouldn't be such an issue today, because most people would keep reading the same mainstream press, knowing they can trust it.

The Intercepts' bias is in unfair credibility-undermining attacks. Being anti-everything is a cute gimmick, but not great news. It's still narrative-first, not evidence-first.

I'm skeptical about trying to find perfect neutrality. Getting reporting (and opinion) from several different POVs seems better to me. It's a fair amount of effort though.

Foreign papers are a good way to get a different perspective. Especially important when the topic is US foreign policy. I like British and Australian ones.

I wish I had a sane US conservative media outlet to recommend. Surely there is one? For the libertarian angle on current events, reason.com is a decent substitute. But that's mostly opinion, not news reporting.

The FT is probably the most serious, neutral, fact checked newspaper you can find. And if you read it frequently enough, there will always be articles that try to explain basic concepts to the non initiated. I'd say it's worth making it a daily read for 6 months.

I find the Economist very politically motivated and stopped reading it.

FT (Financial Times) is the best news organization in the English-speaking world at the moment, in the realm of mainstream topics that catch the whole world's interest. (There are lots of important niche areas that FT ignores.)

It is expensive, $6/week or $10/week (I don't know the meaning of the difference between their standard and premier access levels), but definitely worthwhile if you share with a whole household or coffeeshop.

The difference is Lex, a special type of columns. Some readers live and die by Lex. I am less convinced myself of the value added given the price difference.

I agree.

The South China Morning Post (scmp.com) is also worth taking a look at it, especially now that it's free. It's not quite the same caliber as the FT and it has less coverage of American news, but it's even further removed from Anglo-American media circles so offers an interestingly detached perspective while still speaking a familiar political and social language.

I just recently renewed my FT subscription, though, after I let it lapse. I had dropped it favor of a SCMP subscription a couple of years ago. The FT price increases were relentless. But I never ended up reading the SCMP much and didn't even realize it had become free until recently. FT lowered their rates slightly, and given recent events I decided to start reading it again.

I'm hesitant to call the FT neutral, though. Their journalistic culture is closer than most to the traditional Anglo-American laissez-faire descriptivist business culture (borderline amoral) that most Anglophone outlets moved far away from long ago. (In all fairness, they moved away from it partly because that culture was and still is often times dangerously indistinguishable from complicity wrt slavery, apartheid, authoritarianism, etc.) It's honest but still elitist. Perhaps being elitist is what has allowed it to stay above the fray better than other outlets like the Wall Street Journal or the Economist.

The FT is also de facto internationalist given it's readership and industry focus, which is why so many commenters in their forums seem to presume they're anti-Brexit. (Also, when did their forums get so popular? Returning after a couple of years, it feels like the newspaper equivalent of Eternal September.)

I guess those things have made them effectively largely neutral on a wide range of topics of interest, especially to American readers. But it also means the FT doesn't do serious investigate reporting, or to analyze issues very deeply, outside of industry pieces. I like to think of the FT as a reflection of the consensus opinion (or lack of opinion, as the case may be) among the international elite. And that reflection doesn't make a lot of sense unless you bring a lot of pre-existing knowledge to the table, including an already decent awareness of historic and current events, and the intellectual culture of that elite. (Which is definitely not the same as the culture of the academic elite, although there's significant overlap.)

To understand what I mean about the FT being elitist and internationalist, people unfamiliar with the FT should know that it's common for high-level politicians like Secretaries of State, Foreign Secretaries, and even Prime Ministers and Presidents; and for powerful businessmen with multinational interests to publish commentaries through the FT knowing that they're quickly reaching an international audience with many in similarly powerful positions as themselves. In order to remain such a neutral outlet the FT is purposefully often very restrained in how they approach various topics. As I insinuated above, occasionally that restraint comes across more as stilted analysis, an awkward omission, or even deafening silence.

The Washington Post's investigative reporting is fantastic, while its opinion writing is shrill and barely informative.

I think the reason for the sudden prominence of negative Trump coverage was to address serious backlash the Washington Post was receiving. The Washington Post and other newspapers were giving enormous amounts of free media coverage to the Trump campaign up until the Republican National Convention. The Washington Post overcompensated by deluging readers with opinion pieces to overcome this criticism.

I hope that the interest in opinion pieces will wane, but we will see.

This isn't a puff piece. This is an advertisement for the calendar.

Washington Post became so profitable in 2016 because of the constant Trump bashing (deserved or not, but that's not the point here), so mainly from opinion pieces, not "investigative journalism".

Is it an opinion piece? I felt it crossed the threshold for being a native advertisement.

I think Washington Post did the best job of any major national newspaper this year (at least in the second half) in terms of investigative Trump-related journalism.

Puff-ish piece about his coverage (so you know its true):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...

I imagine he's going to sell a hell of a lot more of them due to this article than he would in the gift shop.

I imagine the only reason he attempted to sell it in the gift shop is so this article could be written.

I'd rather read the story of how they managed to land that product placement.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Fascinating. Where can I read about the Manchurian ambush and the guy shooting into the Chinese biplane?

The events depicted in "Ambush in Manchuria" are described here:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

This appears to be the painting in question:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/7190299989

The circumstances surrounding the gentleman shooting at the biplane from a helicopter are described here:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

I agree with your sentiment that the WaPo should have provided more detailed accounts or external links to such.

CIA Art Collection info:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

I once had a passenger who'd moved to Scottsdale, Arizona when he was a Green Beret (Army Special Forces). They'd picked Scottsdale because General North needed an airport with a big enough runway for their planes [1]...

I always wonder what the secret services are really up to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Contra_Affair

Sorry to break it to you but any time a random person offers up that they were in special operations, they almost always are lying. This paradox is well-known among military servicemembers but not as much by civilians.

You never, ever here these fakers offer up that they were an Army cook or a Navy supply clerk, even though there's 1000x more of these than there are special operators. If someone ever tells you he or she was a generator mechanic or a network tech in the war, they're almost certainly telling you the truth.

I had a strategy for getting people to tell me things that they wouldn't normally have volunteered. This anecdote was mentioned in passing, and I would not have caught the significance if I'd not remembered Oliver North's notoriety.

Share your strategy please.

I asked a lot of questions. Some were oddly-specific, and usually (but not always) answered in the negative. If the answer was probably already supplied by context the question would be rather general, so as to avoid putting my foot in my mouth like that one time I made an assumption about where the passenger was going...

This is something I intend to flesh out some day on my site (url in profile).

Wait, your reference to "General North" was about Oliver North? He was never a general...

This was several years ago now, and I don't remember that passenger's quip about 'North' verbatim.

Sorry but GP is correct, if someone tells you they were in the special forces, even in passing, there's a 98%+ chance they are lying through their teeth no matter how good you believe you are at "getting people to tell [you] things that they wouldn't normally have volunteered." You wouldn't imagine the things these people do to keep up this facade.

Basically, just ignore anyone who tells you they were in the special forces.

Thanks for your comments.

There was a lot of bitterness about the fallout from Iran-Contra... There was more context to the passenger's quip - my oddly-specific question struck a nerve, I guess.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html

Yeah, still not buying it.

"Shipley noted that simple math make it likely that anyone who claims to be a SEAL is probably lying about it. There are fewer than 18,000 men who were ever SEALs, and many of them served during World War II. "We estimate there's probably fewer than 10,000 men alive today who have ever been a SEAL. The FBI did a study a few years ago estimating that each of us has 300 imposters. I put the number closer to 1,000 based on the fraud cases I've seen.""[0]

These people go as far as obtaining tattoos and fake uniforms and memorabilia[1], using their fake "experience" to train police[2], fake Reddit AMAs[3], lying to their own spouse[4], and even using their fake "credentials" to initiate hostage negotiations[5]. Fake experience in special ops is such a part of their fake persona they'd surely say something in passing that sounds reasonable to a lay person even if they weren't looking for attention at that very moment, especially if you are leading them on. There's a zero percent chance that whatever they told you was true.

I'm not gonna believe anyone is/was in the special forces unless I see their service record/DD-214. HINT: A huge indication they aren't special ops is they are talking about special ops.

(The only time I've ever heard anyone say anything about the special forces and I sorta believed them was the jr sailor who was making fun of himself for trying out for the Navy SEALs and failed spectacularly.)

[0] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/navy-seals-imposters-coming-wo...

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2140085/Man-claimed-...

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032025/Special-forc...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1ymsr4/i_am_an_ex_us_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1ymsr4/i_am_an_ex_us_s... https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1ymsr4/i_am_an_ex_us_s...

[4] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fake-sas-hero-lorry-dri...

[5] http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/20/fake-navy-seal-slapped-wit...

It takes a special kind of scum to lie about being in spec ops.

Those who are generally don't tell though - not revealing information unnecessarily is a mindset, one that should be practiced. The most one might hear is if one happens to know someone trying out for it. I only met one such person, a Marine from my former platoon who left to try out for the Green Berets.

Special Ops also includes Airborne. That's roughly 30,000 people right there. Seems to me that it's a poor understanding on part of the public that spec ops means you're a badass.

Of course, your comment about the cook is spot on, and too many people make it seem as thought their role in spec ops was bigger than reality.

Not exactly. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all have special operations forces that are Airborne-qualified (they've attended the U.S. Army Airborne School) and many are also Military Freefall-qualified (aka HALO).

That does not mean, however, that all airborne are special operations. In fact, the vast majority of Airborne troops are not special operations-qualified. Most are members of FORSCOM, which is the traditional major command for U.S. Army ground forces--i.e. not special operations. An example of such a unit is the 82nd Airborne Division. Airborne, but not special operations.

To further complicate things, it's also possible to be a member of a Special Forces unit but not actually be special operations-qualified. Like every other part of the military, special operations requires a vast logistics machine to keep it moving and there are many non-combat personnel who belong to these units and are Airborne-qualified who are not special operators. Typical non-combat jobs in these units include vehicle mechanics, logistics specialists, etc.

Relatively speaking, the special operations units of the U.S. military are a tiny percentage of the overall force. Given their traditional status as "quiet professionals", it's extremely unlikely that someone offering up their status as a "green beret", "Navy SEAL", or "Army Ranger" is telling the truth.

Source: I am a Captain (Engineer branch, very not-special) with eight years of service. Currently serving in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Thanks for your addition. I left out of my post that there are different commands and different definitions of "special" because I was typing on my phone (which I hate).

Have a great new year and thanks for all your work.

No it doesn't. You can look at the org chart and see which units report to which commands, that is public knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVIII_Airborne_Corps#Current_s...

Intelligence agencies proportedly of democracies should invest more in cultural (and philosophical) self-reflection. That might mean "wasting" comparatively tiny sums on art, architecture, history, archival, philosophy and other non-mission-oriented realms because they may bring social wealth and beauty to where there may otherwise be only perfunctory, brutalist utility.

I can't read the article, when I use the web link the WP complains I've read too many articles and I don't see an easy way (outside using dev tools) to get rid of the popup. Of course it is their right to ask me to subscribe.

Try reader mode.

Awesome, that works in Safari. I could not find an official reader mode in Chrome, it seems https://plus.google.com/u/0/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/KEcP88z2... is not launched yet since chrome://flags#enable-reader-mode-toolbar-icon doesn't reveal anything.

You can just use incognito mode in Chrome

Works perfectly, thanks! I guess I was too surprised to see that accessing from Google didn't work that I completely missed this.

I'll sum it up:

    The inaugural “Secret Ops of the CIA” calendar was produced by the nephew
    of an agency contractor killed in the line of duty and features
    reproductions of the actual paintings that have hung for years inside the
    hallways of the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia.

    (...)

    The calendars are on sale for $28 at the International Spy Museum (...)

    (...)

    Toni Hiley, the longtime CIA museum director, said the gift shop can’t sell
    the calendar because “it’s not an official work of the U.S. government.”

Thanks!

Try porn mode.

If you want to fight global terrorism, you needto create one first. Commemorating this very idea, 'The First Sting' painting is priceless.

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