THEY SAID IT WOULDN’T LAST: Or maybe it was: “shouldn’t last.” We forget. But in any case, welcome to the 500th edition of The Dead Drop. Our first edition was published on July 31, 2015 and oh, how things have changed since then. Our very first Dead Drop nugget was about some controversial appointments among the Joint Chiefs. Thank goodness that kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore.
WHAT’S UP DOC(UMENTARY)?: Another item in our original Dead Drop was a piece about a then-upcoming Showtime documentary called The Spymasters, which featured interviews with all 12 of the then-living ex-CIA directors. The promos for the two-hour program promised that interviewees would “talk candidly about torture, secret prisons, drone warfare, alleged assassinations and the constant threat of attack, which begs the question: how far should America go to keep us safe?” A decade later, we’re writing about a new documentary titled, Chaos: The Manson Murders which is based on the book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties. An article in Slate says the film is based on such a wild theory, that even the director of the documentary isn’t sure he believes it. The film doesn’t go quite as far as the book which reportedly theorizes that Manson “deployed the same mind-control techniques that the CIA was using to develop brainwashed assassins who would kill on command with no memory of the act.” We haven’t seen the documentary yet – or perhaps we have – but we’ve been programmed not to remember.
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