Why did Henry Luce, titan of 20th-century journalism, bury the legacy of his boyhood friend and rival, Time magazine co-founder Briton Hadden? That’s the provocative and never-before-told story at the heart of the new book “The Man Time Forgot.” Truthdig interviews its author, Isaiah Wilner. (Above: Hadden, left, and Luce, center, in 1925.)

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John Dean, the man who famously blew the whistle on the Nixon White House during the Watergate hearings, gives a primer on the discussion he will conduct with former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman on Sept. 13 at UCLA, “Bush and the Potential for Impeachment.” Hint: Democrats shouldn’t go for impeachment unless they can convict Bush and remove him from office.

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Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, co-author of “The Impeachment of George W. Bush,” will be discussing that topic at UCLA on Wednesday, Sept. 13. She speaks with Truthdig about the president’s use of signing statements and how it will feel to share a stage at UCLA with onetime Nixon aide John Dean.

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*Editor’s note: I originally had written “...frankly, they’re crap; no government could keep a secret like that from leaking.” But as anything is theoretically possible, I decided to soften my statement.

Time:

... There are psychological explanations for why conspiracy theories are so seductive. Academics who study them argue that they meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it. “We tend to associate major events—a President or princess dying—with major causes,” says Patrick Leman, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway University of London, who has conducted studies on conspiracy belief. “If we think big events like a President being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life and unsettles us.” In that sense, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.

Link

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The Army shot down a developer’s proposal for a military theme park, saying it preferred something “tasteful and appropriate.”

Of course, this is the same military whose recruitment efforts have included inserting story lines into episodes of “The Mickey Mouse Club,” according to the book “Operation Hollywood.”

AP:

The Army said Tuesday it will not consider a Florida developer’s proposal to build a military theme park on a northern Virginia Army base, including rides that would allow visitors to “command the latest M-1 tank” and “feel the rush of a paratrooper freefall.”
The developer’s plans called for a military-style theme park at Fort Belvoir, a few miles south of the nation’s capital, in conjunction with plans for a new National Museum of the United States Army scheduled to be built at the base by 2011.

But on Tuesday, after a front-page article about the proposal appeared in The Washington Post, Army officials said the proposal was “dead on arrival.”

“That proposal ... was dead on arrival, and will be dead on arrival if resubmitted,” said Keith Eastin, the Army’s assistant secretary for installations and environment.

Link

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With a July 21 poll revealing that half the country still thinks Iraq had WMD, the Associated Press asks several experts why this myth persists. One answer: people tend to become “independent of reality.”

This is not without historical precendent. Pictured above is Hiroo Onoda, a former Japanese army officer who was stationed on a Phillipines island at the end of World War II and who kept on fighting until 1974 because no one told him the war had ended.

AP:

Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in
Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

Link

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I got an e-mail this afternoon from a specialist in the public affairs office of the U.S. Central Command. He wanted to invite Truthdig readers to check out CENTCOM’s activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Considering Truthdig’s independent sensibility, I considered it a fairly gutsy request, and decided: Hell, why not? It is our government, after all. And so, without an ounce of irony or sarcasm, I offer a sampling of current news on the CENTOM site:

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