5 Star – Page 152 – Public Intelligence Blog

Timely, read with Zinni, Leebaert, Butler, and Johnson,

April 9, 2006

Stephen Kinzer

EDITED 27 June 2007 to add thoughts from second reading (accidental). While at the beach, ran out of books, bought this not remembering I had already read it, and found new value. Using the new link feature to insert links to the books originally listed.

This is a timely review, although the facts are well known to those who follow international affairs.

In this second (as if new) reading, the following quote stayed with me from page 317: “Most American sponsored ‘regime change' operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened, American security.”

I list the countries covered by this book: Hawaii, Cuba, Nicarague, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Viet-Nam, Chile, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq.

I focus more on Hawaii, in 1893, the first of a new range of intrusive overthrows (beyond the land expansion actions the author chooses not to cover). I am struck–moved–by the duplicitious immoral actions of both the white landowners and the white US government representatives against the people of Hawaii.

The author discusses how Hawaiians were at the time bound by obligations, ritual, and a reverence for nature. I am reminded of how we and the Spanish genocided the native Americans, north and south, individuals who had decades if not centuries of refined knowledge on how to shape and nurture the Earth in harmony with their needs.

This time around, the author's emphasis on how the legal right to buy land led to the loss of local indigenous control and rights. I now firmly believe that foreign and absentee landlords should be eliminated.

This time around, I note the author's emphasis on how corporations are a form of national army, capturing wealth in different ways from an armed force.

This time around, I think of how Dick Cheney has raped the American dream, in so violent and so public a fashion, that America's “lost innocence” can not longer be denied.

This time around, I discover and reflect (being at the beach) on the superb bibliography.

For a broader and perhaps more disturbing overview of the costs to America of corporate-driven foreign policy, see
The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

2006/04/092009/12/04

Review: The Lucifer Principle–A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (Paperback)

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Complexity & Catastrophe, History, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Time to Dust This One Off–Anticipated Radical Islam and Offers Core Ideas for Surviving,

April 9, 2006

Howard Bloom

Buy and read this book if for no other reason than that the author foresaw the global radicalization of Islam against the West in terms much starker than Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and much broader than Yossef Bodansky's brilliant tome on “Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America.

Leon Uris is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is “an act of astonishing intellectual courage,” and I will say that the author has pulled together an extraordinary collage of details in an intricately assembled “story” in which he challenges the assumptions of a number of major conventional intellects. There are 58 “parts” to this book, each part between two and six pages long, with an astounding array of multi-disciplinary quotes and footnotes. No scared ox goes ungored.

Some of the history in this book, of the origin of Mohammed as a possible lunatic and then a vengeful warrior using religion to grab real estate, and of the early split between Sunni and Shiite over the issue of the succession, is very useful today.

The author centers the disparate and very broad-ranging pieces of the book on three core ideas: Earth as a superorganism within which a tribe or religion is itself a superorganism; memes as unifying ideas that create us versus them for the sake of changing the pecking order and feeding off weaker tribes, and–in the only optimistic note in the book, at the end, of collaboration and information sharing as the only means to break out of the pattern of dog eat dog.

He specifically slams religion, and especially fundamentalist religion, as a false god that substitutes faith for control, and as a tool of controlling elites who need to keep the impoverished masses from waking up to the raw fact that masses of people can indeed “take over” factories and estates.

On page 94 the following quote struck me as applying equally to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: “Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture dresses the demon of hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose.”

There are numerous gifted phrases throughout this book, and I can understand the frustration of some in absorbing this dizzying array of data points, but it is surely worth making the effort.

He makes much of the evolution of the brain from reptile (survival) to mammalian (social) to primate (individual) and emphasizes that even the most advanced humans still have all three brains in some form, with the lower forms subject to arousal.

Overall I rate this book one of the ten most useful books relevant to understanding and defeating radical Islam, which the author says is “a meme growing ravenous,” a sleeping giant that has been awakened. He goes back in time to look at how the US, in forcing the French and English to give up the Suez Canal, actually helped inspire Arabia to plan for a day when the West might be sent packing. Similar, the first Gulf War, when the Coalition defeated Iraq, undermined secular Moslem regimes, and further inspired Islamic fundamentalists.

In the author's view we erred gravely in not understanding the asymmetric scope of the threat of Bin Laden and post-Taliban Afghanistan, and we appear to have erred in a truly gigantic way in not seeing that the second Gulf War was in fact doing Iran's bidding and accomplishing something Iran could never have done on its own. The author views Bin Laden as having replaced Russia as a “friend” to the Third World, and anticipates both a rapid spread of Islam among the poor, and a plague of animosity toward to the USA specifically.

The book includes a fascination discussion of psycho-social aspects of nations and tribes and other social groups including religions. While some have been derisive of his discussion of “pecking orders” I believe–having lived overseas most of my life–that he nails it. Not only does instability cause the accepted pecking order to go out the window, but prosperity actually destabilizes established pecking orders. When we eventually implement the grand vision of Jeffrey Sachs (see my review of “The End of Poverty” we will need to be very mindful of the animal force that will be unleashed at the same time, and not make the mistake we made in Iraq, of failing to plan for stabilization and reconstruction.

The last two ideas in this book that really grabbed me are from page 292, on how America began a perceptual shut-down and decline from 1973 onwards, culminating in the cheating culture and lazy obese children and parents that are the bane of most teachers' lives today. America is in “slow” mode and has lost its competitive drive.

The book was hugely ambitious, and it is easy to be snide, as some reviewers are, but I for one found this as close to genius and as close to breath-taking intellectual derring-do as any book I have read in a while. If America is to survive the multiple threats to the Republic, it will take leaders capable of reading and understanding this book, and implementing a 100 year strategy for winning the six front war, beginning on the home front with a draconian reform of our educational and information sharing and distance learning environment.

2006/04/062009/12/04

Review: Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Unknown Binding)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Seminal Work for the Middle Period of Intelligence,

April 6, 2006

Sherman Kent

he history of national intelligence in terms of spies, satellites, and secrets can be concisely separated into three eras: the era of secret wars, the era of strategic analysis, and the era of open source intelligence.

Sherman Kent was without question the dean and the prophet for the second era, and this gem of a book remains a standard in the field and required reading for any intelligence professional (collector, analyst, or other). He did not realize his vision because the clandestine service (of which I was a member) took over the CIA and subordinated the analysts, and because in so doing, the CIA lost touch with most of the open source world.

Today Kent is succeeded by Jack Davis, whose term “analytic tradecraft” can be used to find his collection of memos on the web, and by the CIA University. However, the secret world is now under attack by the emergent World Brain, in which Collective (Public) Intelligence utilizes open sources of information to create Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that is better than secret information, cheaper than secret information, and more useful than secret information because it can be shared broadly.

Those whose sense of self is defined by the secret world will have difficulty adjusting to this, witness the continued references in the secret world to “Open Sources.” Max nix. The war is over, and Kent's vision will ultimately be realized in the third era, the era of open sources.

2006/04/062009/12/04

Review: The Landscape of History–How Historians Map the Past (Paperback)

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (Universities), History

Brilliant Treatise on History as a “Denied Area”,

April 6, 2006

John Lewis Gaddis

He is bluntly critical of the political science and social science communities, branding them with an inability to engage in methodical research or articulation. History is a “denied area.” When we combine our current lack of appreciation of history across all the disciplines, with our long track record of disdain for religion and culture as fundamental aspects of the total intelligence picture, we must recognize that we have created many “virtual denied areas” for ourselves, Islam being but one of many. In that vein, this book can be considered a primer on how to go about understanding a “denied area” by substituting analytic tradecraft for the multiplicity of sources that characterize the more obvious targets of our interest.

2006/04/062009/12/04

Review: The End of Poverty–Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Paperback)

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Nobel Prize Material with One Small Flaw,

April 6, 2006

Jeffrey Sachs

From an American perspective, now that everyone knows Senator John Edwards has focused on poverty as the underpinning for his revisitation of the “two Americas” divide (see also Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, this book should receive even more attention.

The author is extraordinary, and I take issue with some of the quibbling pot shots (when you are in fact so central to something that both the UN Secretary General and the President of Columbia University want you in the top position, perhaps you just might *be* central).

The most important thing I can say about this book is that the timing is perfect–there is a “correlation of forces” emerging that combines An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (see my review of that book), The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (ditto), Collective Intelligence (see my review of Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All) and a massive public awareness that both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt and dysfunctional (see Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and Tom Coburn's Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders ), and that the rampant unilateral evangelical militarism and immoral capitalism that the Bush dynasty has imposed on the earth is in fact a stake in the heart of the American Republic.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that this book represents the pinnacle of “new thinking” in which the public is energized into realizing three great precepts:

1) Republics belong to the people–the government of a Republic can be dissolved by the people when it becomes pathologically dysfunctional. See The Vermont Manifesto.

2) Sovereignty as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia is passe, in that it supports 44 dictators and massive corruption, censorship, genocide, state crime, and so on. There is a place for sovereignty, but only when certain standards of legitimacy, morality, transparency, and sustainability are present. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Philipp Allott's The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

3) Poverty is the fulcrum issue for the world, just as democracy is the fulcrum issue for America. If one reads this book in combination with C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks), it is crystal clear that a shift of money from militarism to education, health, wireless access, and micro-cash economics will unleash the entrepreneurial innovation of five billion people, and literally save the world.

There are a number of stellar aspects to this book.

The author warms my heart when he slams the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for being ignorant and having the wrong economic model. His articulations of the need for “differential diagnosis,” and for the development of “clinical economics” are Nobel Prize material. He is right on target when he lambastes the IMF for overlooking “poverty traps, agronomy, climate, disease, transport, gender, and a host of other pathologies.” A different take on the IMF and World Bank is provided by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man while the contributing delinquency of immoral multinational corporations is addressed by William Grieder in The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy and US insanities are addressed by Clyde Prestowitz in Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.

The author has clearly been influenced by Paul Farmer and his book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) and uses the emergency medicine model to discuss how clinical economics varies from developmental economics. One could say that some nations need to learn to read and feed themselves first, and only after doing so, are they capable of moving up the rung. Lest anyone think the author is over-reaching, he is quite clear on limiting his objective to the elimination of EXTREME poverty, not all poverty.

The bottom line is quite clear: for just 1% of the US GDP, or a 5% surcharge on families making over $200,000 a year, extreme poverty can be eliminated by the year 2025. Anyone familiar with Hans Morgenthau and the “sources of national power” will understand that people rather than geography or resources or military power are the fundamental unit. People can think and share information and innovate. The author clearly discusses how disease destroys labor–including the entire male working class in Africa, and how disease, poverty, and education interact. The checklist for “medical triage” of a country, on page 84, is superb. The “big five” interventions are Agricultural, Health, Education, power-transport-communications, and safe drinking water-sanitation.

The author takes special care to dispel a number of myths, chief among them the myth that African corruption makes foreign aid irrelevant. While there is a great deal to be said for aid mis-management leading to black markets and such (see William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict) the bottom line is clear: the US Government is both well behind other more enlightened governments in its rate of giving, and downright incompetent at “doing” aid. Indeed, the author can be noted for his general critique of all “official advice” as being generally ignorant.

This is not an ivory tower idealist. He discusses ten examples of global scale success stories from the Green Revolution to cell phones in Bangladesh, and settles on Stabilization, Liberalization, Privatization, Social Safety Net, and Institutional Harmonization as the steps needed to migrate from failed state to stabilized state.

Interestingly, he disassociates himself from the Harvard professors that helped the Russian oligarchs loot the Russian state through predatory privatization, and deliberately slams Professor Andrew Shleifer's role on page 144.

The author appears to be the first person to write a fifteen page plan for migrating a country (Poland) from a socialist economy to a market economy, writing from midnight to dawn due to local time pressures. This book is nothing short of riveting. It will stand the test of time as a prescription that can be explained to the voters, understood by politicians, and enforced by democratic elections.

There is only one small flaw: ending poverty will increase the number of stronger beings jostling for a move up in the pecking order. The program will need to be accompanied by both very strong militaries and police, and by very strong conservation efforts to keep increasingly strong billions from fighting over decresing resources.

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: Since reading this book, 24 of us have come together to co-found the Earth Intelligence Network, and we have a vision for teaching the five billion poor “one cell call at a time” using Telelanguage.com and 100 million volunteers with Skype and Internet access, covering among them the needed 183 languages. By creating wealth locally (see below list of representative books), this is stabilizing and addresses my own concern from the earlier review.

See also:
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives

and most importantly,
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

2006/04/042009/12/04

Review: A Farewell to Justice–Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Hardcover)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Sufficient to Impeach the Warren Commission; CIA Now Proven Complicit,

April 4, 2006

Joan Mellen

Edit of 11 Dec 07: Since I wrote this review, another book has come out, Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History and it conclusively documents two points:

1) JFK was assassinated by a Cuban exile team trained by CIA to assassinate Castro, that used their training against JFK, ostensibly for the Bay of Pigs mess. CIA then covered this up.

2) JFK was warned by Bobby that there were strong indications of a plot to kill him, and JFK himself blew it off, entrusting his safety to a Secret Service with no idea a professional CIA hit team was coming in.

As a former clandestine case officer for the CIA who served in Latin America and also lived in Viet-Nam during the ten coups, one of which killed Ngo Dinh Diem, I picked this book up with some trepidation.

It is an exhausting review, a truly incredible accomplishment for a single human being without any visible corporate resources for doing machine processing or visualization of all of the information.

Here's my bottom line as a 54-year old with over 30 years government service:

1) The Warren Commission, like the 9-11 Commission, blew it and mis-served the nation. They are retrospectively impeachable for dereliction of duty.

2) The Central Intelligence Agency, and Ted Shackley in particular, have a lot to answer for, and continue to lie and withhold key documents from the American people. We need the moral equivalent of a truth & reconciliation commission on covert action–I thought the Church Commission had done some of that, but clearly there is more to be done.

3) We clearly do not have a government that is capable of being consistently honest, at the same time that we have thousands of dedicated government employees who have no idea what the “cowboys” are doing. The recent outrage over CIA renditions and torture are all too familiar for those who have studied the Phoenix assassination program in Viet-Nam, or the JMWAVE efforts against Castro that blew back against John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy.

4) The time has come for the people to arm themselves with open source intelligence. I want to cut the spines off all these books that are creating new revelations and new detail, put it all in a machine, and makes some sense out of it. We are a few years away from that point, but the day is coming, and when that day comes, we need to hand down some public indictments, including posthumous indictments, and begin to set the stage for honorable governance and ethical intelligence.

This book may not be completely accurate–it tends to assume the worst of CIA at all points–but it is assuredly enough to persuade me that US intelligence has much to answer for, and the Warren Commission *should* be retrospectively impeached.

For those who under-estimate the value of history, see Robert Parry on Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'(Ted Shackley played a big role there as well, allegedly running guns to Central America, drugs back through America to Europe, and cash from Europe home), and also the complaints of the official Department of State historians, who are outraged that the CIA will still not release documents from the 1960's without which we cannot properly evaluate our foreign policy misadventures in retrospect.

2006/04/042009/12/04

Review: The End of Poverty–Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Hardcover)

5 Star, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Silver Bullet for John Edwards? Solid Thinking for the Rest of Us,

April 4, 2006

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Now that everyone knows Senator John Edwards has focused on poverty as the underpinning for his revisitation of the “two Americas” divide (see also Barbara Ehrenreich “Nickel and Dimed” and David Shipler's “Working Poor,” this book should receive even more attention.

The most important thing I can say about this book is that the timing is perfect–there is a “correlation of forces” emerging that combines “An Army of Davids” (see my review of that book), “The Left Hand of God (ditto), Collective Intelligence (see my review of Tom Atlee, “The Tao of Democracy,”) and a massive public awareness that both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt and dysfunctional (see Peter Peterson's “Running on Empty” and Tom Coburn “Breach of Trust”), and that the rampant unilateral evangelical militarism and immoral capitalism that the Bush dynasty has imposed on the earth is in fact a stake in the heart of the American Republic.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that this book represents the pinnacle of “new thinking” in which the public is energized into realizing three great precepts:

1) Republics belong to the people–the government of a Republic can be dissolved by the people when it becomes pathologically dysfunctional.

2) Sovereignty as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia is passé, in that it supports 44 dictators and massive corruption, censorship, genocide, state crime, and so on. There is a place for sovereignty, but only when certain standards of legitimacy, morality, transparency, and sustainability are present.

3) Poverty is the fulcrum issue for the world, just as democracy is the fulcrum issue for America. If one reads this book in combination with C. K. Prahalad's “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” it is crystal clear that a shift of money from militarism to education, health, wireless access, and micro-cash economics will unleash the entrepreneurial innovation of five billion people, and literally save the world.

There are a number of stellar aspects to this book.

The author warms my heart when he slams the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for being ignorant and having the wrong economic model. His articulations of the need for “differential diagnosis,” and for the development of “clinical economics” are Nobel Prize material. He is right on target when he lambastes the IMF for overlooking “poverty traps, agronomy, climate, disease, transport, gender, and a host of other pathologies.” A different take on the IMF and World Bank is provided by John Perkins in “Confessional of an Economic Hit Man” while the contributing delinquency of immoral multinational corporations is addressed by William Grieder in “The Soul of Capitalism” and US insanities are addressed by Clyde Prestowitz in “Rogue Nation.”

The author has clearly been influenced by Paul Farmer and his book “The Pathologies of Power,” and uses the emergency medicine model to discuss how clinical economics varies from developmental economics. One could say that some nations need to learn to read and feed themselves first, and only after doing so, are they capable of moving up the rung. Lest anyone think the author is over-reaching, he is quite clear on limiting his objective to the elimination of EXTREME poverty, not all poverty.

The author takes special care to dispel a number of myths, chief among them the myth that African corruption makes foreign aid irrelevant. While there is a great deal to be said for aid mis-management leading to black markets and such (see William Shawcross, “Deliver Us From Evil,”) the bottom line is clear: the US Government is both well behind other more enlightened governments in its rate of giving, and downright incompetent at “doing” aid. Indeed, the author can be noted for his general critique of all “official advice” as being generally ignorant.

Category: 5 Star

Review: Overthrow–America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)

Review: The Lucifer Principle–A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (Paperback)

Review: Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Unknown Binding)

Review: The Landscape of History–How Historians Map the Past (Paperback)

Review: The End of Poverty–Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Paperback)

Review: A Farewell to Justice–Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Hardcover)

Review: The End of Poverty–Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Hardcover)