Former CIA director and tabloid star David Petraeus will be teaching at CUNY come August, according to an announcement by the school.
He will serve as a visiting professor of public policy at Macaulay Honors College, teaching young men and women about topics like civil rights, abortion, and crime.
The announcement comes only a few short months Read More
Slate’s Fred Kaplan reports that David Petraeus resigned as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency after he had an affair with one of his biographers, author Paula Broadwell. Ms. Broadwell co-authored a glowing portrait of Mr. Petraeus titled, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Read More
Former four-star general and current director of the CIA David Petraeus has tendered his resignation to the president. Wire services are still sorting out the details, however NBC is reporting that Mr. Petraeus resigned due to an extramarital affair. Read More
It’s rare as a pink giraffe, but every once in a blue moon a movie comes along in which each piece fits seamlessly and every detail works. Argo is one of them. I have come to regard Ben Affleck as better, stronger and more self-assured behind a camera than he is in front of one, but in this exemplary, meticulously detailed thriller about a fake movie that saved real lives, he wears both hats magnificently. The result is a movie that defines perfection.
Gifted, intelligent and full of cogent ideas, Mr. Affleck can almost always be depended on to come up with something fascinating, coherent and thoroughly cinematic. Argo, his third feature film as a director after Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), is no exception. It grabbed me by the lapels and held my attention for two solid hours without a sideward glance, and I can’t wait to see it again. You have to see it twice if you want to absorb the myriad pieces of a jigsaw too fantastic to accept as fact, although we know going in that the recently declassified records of an amazing history lesson prove otherwise. This movie is not only true, but unbelievably true. Read More
Oleg Kalugin, a man some credit with helping to foil the hard-line coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991—and others, including Vladimir Putin, have dubbed a traitor—did not appear to partake of the catered spread on Wednesday afternoon in the basement meeting room at the Discovery Times Square exhibit space. The occasion was a press luncheon pegged to the launch of SPY: The Secret World of Espionage, a traveling exhibition of Cold War memorabilia, and Major General Kalugin, now a professor with the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia, was there to offer support—and perhaps to serve as something of a living relic himself.
Actually, maybe he wolfed down a turkey sandwich when we turned away. We can’t be sure, which is why we are not in the espionage game. But Maj. Gen. Kalugin has good reason to be careful. The former head of foreign counterintelligence for the KGB, he publicly denounced the agency, spoke up against corruption and vilified Mr. Putin as a war criminal over the war in Chechnya.
Wikileaks will hold a press conference Monday at 12 p.m. in London to discuss its “Global Intelligence File.” The “File,” which the whistle-blowing site claims comprises over 5 million Anonymous-hacked emails from Texas-based Stratfor, contains a great deal of what appears to be highly sensitive information regarding Stratfor’s sources, how they pay sources and their operating techniques in general. One document circulated among Stratfor staff in 2007 may be of particular interest to the company’s customers, as its plain-spoken language appears to reflect an internal attitude toward Stratfor clientele as well as several federal agencies that was obviously never intended for public consumption. It also implies (perhaps jokingly) that Stratfor was willing to do extralegal work to covertly gather information. Read More
More secret agents appear in a pharmacologically induced state of general anesthesia called This Means War. A hack called simply McG, who perpetrated on the world such forgettable trash wallows as two idiotic Charlie’s Angels movies and Terminator Salvation, is hardly the professional you want around to monitor the dosage. The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as “the worst movie of the year.” A premature assessment? Maybe. It’s only February. But after This Means War, one thing is certain: The year has nowhere to go but up. Read More
Movies about covert CIA operatives make their own clichés, and in a violent and pointless waste of time and money called Safe House, they come in twos, like double vision. This movie wouldn’t be worth the effort even if it were about something, which it isn’t. Correction: It’s about how Denzel Washington is not above trashing his reputation when the salary works, even if the movie doesn’t. Read More
A day after hacker collective Anonymous claimed credit for taking down the Central Intelligence Agency’s site (cia.gov), a site related to Mexico’s mining industry and a site run by the State of Alabama, Interpol.int has gone offline.
The Friday hacks appeared to compromise emails and other sensitive documents: Read More
Just what we need — another violent comic-book fantasy about another covert government operative (a catch-phrase that describes just about everybody in escapist-action franchise movies from incoherent Tom Cruise Mission Impossible flicks to Jason Bourne cinematic Xeroxes with Matt Damon). This one is called Haywire. The only difference is that this time the battering ram doing all the kickboxing, slicing and killing is a woman, more or less played, since she cannot act, by kung fu expert, karate specialist, martial arts star and Angelina Jolie wannabe Gina Carano. She’s a female boxer who was defeated in 2009 by Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in the Strikeforce Women’s Championship, whatever that is. The men she beats the crap out of are an all-star bevy of camera-ready hunks baring their pecs in faceless roles to sell tickets. They are wasting their time, but, boy, do we need them. It is doubtful that the box-office flame exuded by Ms. Carano on her own could draw moths.
Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It’s the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway. Read More
