Atrocities & Genocide – Page 6 – Public Intelligence Blog

Zoe Oldenbourg

Setting the Parameters for Modern Western Genocide, January 7, 2014

Establishing the template for Christian Barbary

In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III, accused heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers–a vast (now very popular wine-producing region) known as Languedoc — in a great crusade. This most holy of wars, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years. It was a long savage war fought for the very soul of Christendom.

The author, Zoe Oldenbourg, born in St Petersburg in 1916 and educated at the Lycee Moliere and the Sorbonne, has produced a swift-moving, gripping novelistic narrative of this horrific crusade. Like others before her, she has drawn in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245 and woven it into a stunning narrative.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Massacre at Montsegur”

2013/12/04

Review: They Were Soldiers – How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Disease & Health, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Ann Jones

5.0 out of 5 stars A necessary book — Gabriel's trumpet on true cost of war, December 3, 2013

A necessary book. The author has rendered a national — a global — service in documenting the psychological, social, and physical costs of war, costs that surpass the continually astonishing financial cost of war. SIX STARS (my top 10%)

I read this book this afternoon while waiting for a flight out of Afghanistan. The book hit me hard. Although I have been well aware of the staggering number of disabled veterans and suicidal veterans, most of what this book offers up was new to me and deeply disturbing.

The book also made me realize that as an intelligence officer save in a basement — the occasional big car bomb not-with-standing — my time in Afghanistan has been illusory, in that I have not at any time confronted the blood and guts pathos that this book lays out with a professionalism that is compelling.

The book also forces me to think of my three sons, the youngest of whom is contemplating joining the military after college. While I served and retired honorably from the Marine Corps, my wars were Viet-Nam as the son of an oil man and El Salvador as a clandestine case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. I've seen my share of dead people across all three, but I never personally experienced the deep gut-wrenching mind-altering pathos that this book lays down.

QUOTE (5): [This book] is about the damage done to soldiers, their families, their communities, and the rest of us, who for another half-century at least will pay for their care, their artificial limbs, their medications, their benefits, their funerals, and the havoc they dutifully wrought under orders around the world.”

Continue reading “Review: They Were Soldiers – How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story”

2013/11/232013/11/24

Review: The Family Jewels – The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity

John Prados

4.0 out of 5 stars 5 fpr content, 3 for editing, 4 on balance — a unique book that could have been better, November 23, 2013

My review itemizes the highlights. This is a valuable book that is unique in its summary of both the historical misdeeds of the CIA and the fast forward current misdeeds of the past two Administrations (Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden). However, this book could have been better. I recommend a second edition with vastly more attentive editing and a moderate inclusion of sub-titles and visualizations.

Three big points up front:

01 The author has chosen not to include mind-control in this book, nor does he include active ties with criminal organizations including the Boston to NYC to DC pedophile rings as well as the Catholic Church as enabler. So the book might better be titled “Most But Not All of the Family Jewels.”

02 By its nature, focusing on blatant mis-deeds, the book does not — nor should it be expect to — address the larger misdeeds of the CIA, such as being worthless or wrong most of the time [I've served in three of the four directorates, I continue to believe that CIA can and should be saved, but right now it is a basket case]. Under my signature below are four online references on this point.

03 This is a book about the CIA, which is the “runt” of the intelligence litter when compared to ODNI, NSA, NGA, and defense intelligence. I consider NSA to be vastly more criminal, vastly less constitutional, and vastly more worthless than CIA — the return on investment for CIA is perhaps 20%, for NSA less than 2%. For direct access to most of my reviews of intelligence books here at Amazon, seek out < Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most) >.

The book is organized into a summary review of each of the following, with each chapter concluding with modern-day equivalents and prognostications that I consider a real value-added.

Continue reading “Review: The Family Jewels – The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power”

2013/11/22

Review: God’s Terrorists – The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Culture, Research, History, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Terrorism & Jihad

Charles Allen

Important History Not Understood By Most, November 22, 2013

The historical half is mind-glazing, the more recent chapters highly relevant to understanding the deep ignorance of the US Intelligence Community and the US policy (prostitution) community these past 12 years.

I have given the book four stars in part because it is not designed to illuminate the threat in visualizable terms, and it is not up to date. Now that Saudi Arabia has declared war on the USA and the West generally (joining with Israel in a truly bizarre satanic alliance), and on Iran and the Shi'ite portion of Afghanistan specifically, this book absolutely merits updating and republication, hopefully with some decent maps and graphics and tables this next time around.

Early on in a nut-shell: Wahhabism spread in the 19th century, first throughout the Arabian penninsula and then to the Indian subcontinent including what are now India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Wahabbism is both a fundamentalist ideology that wins over deep converts, and a form of mercenary religion, buying its way into susceptible corners.

The most important point stressed throughout the book is that Wahhabism is outside the mainstream of Muslim society.

The big surprise for me, and one reason I am distressed at how badly we prepare people for service in this area, is the deep history of Wahhabism among the Pashtun. Today Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Qatar and the United Arab Republic seem bent on funding a religious war in Central and South Asia, and no one seems to be paying attention to this emergent threat. I would go so far as to say we are now, in this region, where we were in 1988-1989 when the Saudis first began funding the global Islamic outreach program led by Sheikh Binbaz and represented in part by young Bin Laden.

Continue reading “Review: God's Terrorists – The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad”

2013/11/192013/11/19

Review (Guest): BREACH OF TRUST – How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Civil Society, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Andrew J. Bacedvich

A disturbing but vitally necessary read. Take note, Mr President, and Congress too

By Timothy J. Bazzett on September 10, 2013

Andrew Bacevich's latest offering, BREACH OF TRUST, is going to make a lot of people squirm – if people read it, that is. Because in this book he tells us flat out that an all-volunteer army in a democratic society simply does not work, and that the present system is “broken.” It is bankrupting our country, and not just financially, but morally. He tells us that Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the longest and most expensive wars in U.S. history, have evoked little more than “an attitude of cordial indifference” on the part of a shallow and selfish populace more concerned with the latest doings of the Kardashians, professional superstar athletes or other vapid and overpaid millionaire celebrities, reflecting “a culture that is moored to nothing more than irreverent whimsy and jeering ridicule.”

Bacevich cites General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who spoke about having “skin in the game,” meaning that when a country goes to war every town and city should be at risk. McChrystal went on to say the unthinkable: “I think we'd be better if we actually went to a draft these days … for the nation it would be a better course.”

Horrors! That dreaded “D” word finally uttered aloud. Well, I'd say it's about damn time. And Bacevich agrees, noting that in his many speaking engagements over the past ten years “I can count on one hand the number of occasions when someone did NOT pose a question about the draft, invariably offered as a suggestion for how to curb Washington's appetite for intervention abroad and establish some semblance of political accountability.”

Continue reading “Review (Guest): BREACH OF TRUST – How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country”

2013/11/042014/03/30

Review (Guest): Trail of Tears – The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813-1853

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide

Gloria Jahoda

The Acknowledged Moral low point of American History, November 4, 2013

Herbert L Calhoun “paulocal”

This review is from: Trail of Tears (Hardcover)

This is an unrelenting narrative, tightly written and carefully researched of one of the lowest points in the moral history of a country whose national narrative is full of moral low points. It chronicles a trail of sanctioned deception, dishonesty, criminal intent, dissembling, duplicity and willful genocide, as morally reprehensible as anything ever seen in the history of a self-conscious nation.

The reader simply becomes a mesmerized spectator to crimes that (to paraphrase Frederick Douglass' famous words) would “disgrace a nation of savages.” Crimes all waged under the American flag (the supposed banner of equality and freedom), by U.S. governmental officials like President Andrew Jackson, who was the architect and operational officer of the removal proceedings.

Whenever the legal system could not be rigged to allow the process to proceed, it was then ignored and the crimes proceeded anyway, against the government's own treaty obligations and against a helpless people completely out of options.

For a nation claiming to be religious, the “trail of tears” surely shamed the white god as much as it did the fledgling nation. Against the most basic of biblical teaching, the “enforced death march,” was waged against a people willing to accept anything short of cultural genocide. However, cultural genocide was exactly what the white American nation demanded and wanted, and acting at its behest, that was exactly the price President Andrew Jackson delivered.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Trail of Tears – The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813-1853”

2013/10/202014/03/30

Review (Guest): Savage Kingdom – The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide

Benjamin Woolley

Some Long-term American Myths finally Meet Reality, October 20, 2013

By Herbert L Calhoun “paulocal”

EXTRACT

An important footnote on Slavery

Chapter Twenty-One, entitled the Imbangala, tells the story of how slavery got into the English colonial picture. It is such an interesting and unexpected story that I am including a rough summary of it here as well.

The transatlantic slave trade began under a license issued at Seville, in 1598 while Portugal was a province of Spain. At the time, Portugal had had much success in enlisting very unreliable local black armies to help it defeat local towns in Angola raided for large caches of slaves taken as spoils of war. That is, until it was routed by a chief of the Ndogolo people. Rather than continuing to rely on the unreliable “black armies,” Portugal hired the much more feared and ruthless, if not entirely barbaric, group of itinerant marauders called the “Imbangala,” best known for settling within a country, sucking it dry and then moving on.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Savage Kingdom – The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America”