5 Star – Page 165 – Public Intelligence Blog

Not Enough on Spies, Plenty on State-Level Corruption and FBI Idiocy,

January 27, 2005

I. C. Smith

I bought this book in an airport for two reasons: because I knew the man, and because the FBI does not produce enough good authors. Although I was disappointed by finding that only 20% of the book covers spies and lies, while 80% covers bureaucratic bungling and leadership failures with in the FBI, overall I put it down fully satisfied.

We all know now that Al Qaeda was never operating in secret, and even today, is not operating in secret. We are simply incompetent at looking at open sources in foreign languages. IC Smith conveys this perfectly early on in his book, on page 7, when he repeats something he said that was published in the media, to wit “These guys were not superhuman, but they were playing in a system that was more inept than they were.” I share IC's anger over the FBI's failure to translate and exploit the many boxes of documents in Arabic that were captured in the Philippines and after the first World Trade Center attack, the botched car bombing.

If there is one word that summarizes this book's message, beyond incompetency, it is “corruption.” IC Smith tells it like it is when he discusses Congressional corruption, refusing to fix known problems in the Intelligence Community; Presidential corruption in abusing power and covering up those abuses; state-level corruption across Arkansas; intelligence community management corruption and malfeasance–some would even say treason, although IC avoids this word.

On a very practical level, IC Smith is probably the foremost authority to come forward and denounce the practice of having prosecuting attorneys manage investigations. The book has many examples of where trained investigators were not allowed to do their job, and prosecutors botched or blocked investigations that would have otherwise been timely and successful.

In passing, he skewers the staff at the FBI Academy, almost none of whom have actual street experience (nor do most FBI managers at the wood-paneled office level), and it is clear that while America has many dedicated Americans serving within the FBI, they are badly trained and badly led.

In addition to this book I recommend Michael Levine's Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War (on the Drug Enforcement Agency), and Mark Riebling's Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11–How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security (on the FBI-CIA wars that continue to this day), as well as George Allen's book None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (on the continuing ability of the White House–regardless of occupation–and the Intelligence Community–to lie to themselves, to Congress, and to the American people).

IC is a straight shooter. I'm glad he made it to retirement without being shot by a crook or stabbed in the back (fatally) by one of the suits in Washington that pretend to serve the people while serving only themselves.

Links added 20 Dec 07:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

2005/01/222009/12/04

Review: Leadership and the New Science–Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Leadership

“Tipping Point” Book Vital to Government, Not Just Business,

January 22, 2005

Margaret J. Wheatley

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

This book is beyond five stars, and not just for business, where it is receiving all the praise it is due, but within government, where it has not yet been noticed. It was recommended to me by the author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and I now recommend it to everyone I know. If there are two books that can “change the world,” these are the ones.

Although the Chinese understood all this stuff centuries ago (Yin/Yang, space between the dots, the human web), the author is correct when she notes late in the book that the commoditization of the human worker (Cf. Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System) and the emphasis on scientific objectivity and scientific manager (Cf. Jean Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) were perhaps the greatest error we might have made in terms of long-run progress. Coincidentally, as I finished the book, on the Discovery channel in the background they were discussing how the leveeing of the Mississippi blocked the Louisiana watershed from cleansing the Mississippi naturally, as it once used to.

It's all about systems–the author does cite Donella Meadows' 1982 article in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly, but does not pay much heed to the large body of literature that thrived in the 1970's around the Club of Rome.

There are perhaps three bottom lines in this book that I would recommend to any government leader who hopes to stabilize and reconstruct our world:

1) Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. Blocking or controlling information flows stunts our growth and virtually assures defeat if not death. It is the optimization of listening–being open to *all* information (and especially all the information the secret world now ignores)–that optimizes our ability to adjust, evolve, and grow.

2) Command & control is history, block and wire diagrams are history. General Al Gray had it right in the 1990's when he talked about “commander's intent” as the baseline. Leaders today need to be disruptive, to look for dissonant views and news, and to empower all individuals at all levels with both information, and the authority to act on that information.

3) Disorder is an *opportunity*. We have the power to define ourselves, our “opponents,” and our circumstances in ways that can either inspire protective, constricted, secretive, “armed” responses, or inclusive, open, sharing “pro-active” peaceful responses.

The author is to be praised for noting early on in the book that “Ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in the relationship any organization has with colleagues, stakeholders, and communities.” I would extend that to note that social ethics and foreign policy ethics are the foundation for sustainable life on the planet, and we appear to be a long way from understanding that it is ethics, not guns, that will stabilize and fertilize…Cf Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

It also merits comment that the author essentially kills the industry of forecasting, scenarios, modeling, and futures simulations. I agree with her view (and that of others) that early warning is achieved, not through the theft of secret plans and intentions or the forecasting of behavior, but rather by casting a very wide net, listening carefully to all that is openly available, sharing it very widely (as the LINUX guys say, put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug will be invisible), and then being open to changed relationships. Trying to maintain the status quo will simply not do.

I give the author credit for carrying out an extraordinary survey of the literature on quantum mechanics, and for developing a PhD-level explanation of why old organization theory, based on the linear concepts of Newtonian physics, is bad for us, and how the new emergent organization theory, understood by too few, is let about the things and more about the relationships between and among the things.

This is an elegant essay and a heroic personal work of discovery, interpretation, and integration. While I would have liked to see more credit given to Kuhn, Drucker, Garfield, Brand, Rheingold, and numerous others that I have reviewed here for Amazon, on balance, given the academic narrowness of her Harvard PhD, I think the author has performed at the Olympic level. This is a radical book, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Hampden-Turner's book, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. which as I recall was not accepted by Harvard as a thesis at the time. Perhaps Harvard is evolving (smile).

For other key books that complement and precede this book, see my lists on information society, collective intelligence, business intelligence, and intelligence qua spies and secrecy in an open world.

A handful of other amazing books (am limited to ten total):
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

2004/12/262009/12/04

Review: “Armed and Dangerous”–My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Undercover in Rebellion, Now Minister for Intelligence,

December 26, 2004

Ronnie Kasrils

I have just spent two days absorbing his book. Some highlights:

1) The big fights, the important fights, take 25 years or more. The transformative fights, the nation-wide or trans-regional transformations, take 25-50 years.

2) When any government seeks to repress discontent by suspending the due process of law, stand by for a revolution.

3) Fighting this revolution, without a friendly country adjacent to South Africa, and with South African mercenaries and forces all too able to strike at will across Africa, was very very hard. Bomb-making, communications, all hard.

4) Camaraderie should not be allowed to undermine operational security and counterintelligence. From day one, misplaced faith and lax checking of backgrounds was very costly, and the ANC was riddled with informers, many of them passed through the US and UK.

5) The Russians, East Germans, and Cubans all provided aid with no strings attached–indeed, the West's excessive propaganda against communism actually inspired interest in communism. This book is one of the best references I have found, as a US intelligence professional, with respect to the good done by the so-called “main enemy” in the specific case of South Africa.

6) I believe the author when he recounts discussions with Russians focusing on the defense nature of their military investments, and their longer-term strategic focus on beating US capitalism in a straight-up economic competition with socialism. I had to think as I worked through this section: if Ronnie Kasrils could have these discussions, how could CIA get it so wrong all those years?

7) Across the entire book is a full range of clandestine technique. These guys knew how to use newspaper ads, codes, changes in times and dates, pre-arranged blind meetings, brush passes, dead drops, the whole nine yards. They lived it–and unlike US spies, who get sent home, if they failed at undercover operations they paid with their lives or spent years–sometimes decades–in prison.

8) The United Kingdom gets high marks for its balanced reception of ANC officers, and Scotland Yard gets the best marks of all.

9) Key elements of the ANC victory, apart for the grotesque self-destructive nature of apartheid, were persistence, propaganda, infrastructure, and training. Their leadership was clever, strategic, and focused. The ANC also understood that politics was as important as tactical and technical training–the moral is to the material as 10:1 and all that good stuff.

10) Training as well as solidarity were well balanced with sports, music, and art.

11) The East Germans taught them how to do Vietnamese tunnels (see my review of the “Tunnels of Cu Chi.”) My first thought was Colombia and drugs–I suspect the Americans have no idea what's under the ground in the Andes.

12) They were not ready for air attacks, especially air attacks streaking in on them from South Africa within other nominally sovereign countries.

13) A major contributor to their eventual success was the over-all trend in the region, with victories in Angola and Zimbabwe chief among the contributing factors.

14) The revolution went through a mutinous and discouraging phase. I was reminded of Bill Moyer's “Doing Democracy” where he quotes Tom Atlee in saying that Stage 5 in any long-term movement toward democracy is inevitably the stage where there is a perception of failure.

15) In the final stages before victory, one of their biggest problems was quality control over incoming recruits and over captured informants and traitors.

16) Chapter 16 is a lovely discussion of their use of open sources of intelligence. He says: “The greatest proportion of intelligence comes from published material. Since South Africa is a modern, industrial country, we were able to acquire information covering almost its entire infrastructure. This included everything from road, rail and power networks to national key points and strategic objectives. Pretoria's predilection for propaganda provided rich pickings from a range of military and police literature.”

17) These guys ran a marvelous early warning system that got citizen conscripts, when called up, to call in to telephone answering machines.

18) They pioneered the integration of maps, telephone books, index cards, and brain power in charting all the unoccupied farms across the country, ultimately plotting routes from the border all the way to Pretoria.

19) When De Klerk legalized the ANC, they were initially taken in and got sloppy with security. The author does a fine job of showing that De Klerk, while bowing to the inevitable in the end, was much more duplicitous and hostile to the ANC after starting the reconciliation process, than most in the West realize.

20) The author (who is now the Minister for Intelligence Services after having been the Deputy Minister of Defense) appears to be skilled at understanding the value of the media, and the importance of detecting and fighting disinformation early on.

21) His chapter on his tenure at the Ministry of Defence could teach us something about transformation and how to accelerate it.

In the end, and over-all, I am left with four impressions:

a) Morality really does matter, as does mass. A mass of people with morality is more powerful than an elite with guns.

b) Torture and murder by minions can be forgiven and understood–it is their political masters who must be held accountable.

c) Women are the best. the most steadfast revolutionaries–and their men could not survive decades of hardship without the steadfast commitment of their companions.

d) South Africa is ready (he quotes Thabo Mbeki) to make its own history.

For myself, I am quite certain that Ronnie Kasrils is going to lead South Africa's intelligence community in a way that no other national intelligence leader could possibly understand: in the service of the people, harnessing and inspiring their collective intelligence, placing intelligence in the service of the people.

This is an exceptional person…the real deal.

2004/12/242009/12/04

Review: Counterculture Through the Ages–From Abraham to Acid House

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research

From Socrates to Brand, Sterling, and Rheingold: Good Stuff,

December 25, 2004

Ken Goffman a.k.a. R.U. Sirius

I found this book in an airport, and bought it for three reasons: 1) because Bruce Sterling plugged it; 2) because my 15-year old is well on his way to being part of the emerging counter-culture; and 3) because I do believe that “power to the people” is now imminent–not if, but when.

It starts slow, quickly improves by page 50, and as I put down the book I could not help but think, “tour de force.” This is both a work of scholarship and an advanced commentary that puts counter-culture movements across history into a most positive context.

Across the ages, the common currency of any counter-culture is the will to live free of constraints, limiting the impositions of authority. Indeed, it is very hard not to put this book down with an altered appreciation for hippies, war protesters and civil rights activists, for the book makes it clear that they are direct intellectual, cultural, and emotional descendants of both Socrates and the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

From Socrates to Taoism, Zen, Sufis, Troubadours, the Enlightenment, the Americans, Bohemian Paris, and into the 1950's through the 1970's, the author's broad brush review of the history of counter-culture in all its forms is helpful to anyone interested in how the next twenty years might play out.

The bottom line is clear: we need the counter-culture, and it is time for this century's culture hackers–of whom Stewart Brand may be the first–along with the author–to rise from their slumber.

Some side notes:

1) An underlying theme, not fully brought out, is that anything in excess or without balance can be harmful. Absolute dictatorship by religions is as bad as absolute secular dictatorship. Science without humanity, humanity without science.

2) The Jewish religion is favorably treated in this book as perhaps the most counter-cultural and individualistic of the religions. I found this intriguing and was quite interested in some of the specific examples.

3) I disagree with the author's attack on Roger Shattuck's “Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography,” and would go so far as to say that the two books should be read together, along with “Voltaire's Bastards,” “Consilience,” and a few of the other books on my information society list.

The author concludes somewhat somberly, not at all sure that there is much good ahead. He very rationally notes that before we begin the next big counter-cultural movement we should probably focus on fundamentals first: do we have enough water, energy, food, medicine?

I agree with that, and I agree with John Gage's prediction in 2000, that DoKoMo phones in the hands of pre-teens, and Sony Playstations at $300 with access to the Internet, are irrevocably changing the balance of power. Jonathan Schell is on target in “Unconquerable World: Power, Non-Violence, and the Will of the People,” and both Tom Atlee (“The Tao of Democracy”) and Howard Rheingold (“Smart Mobs”) as well as James Surowiecki (“The Wisdom of the Crowds”) all show us clearly that information is going to out the corrupt and restore balance to our lives. It is not a matter of if, but when. Collective intelligence–public intelligence–is here to stay.

2004/12/182009/12/04

Review: Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public)

Superb book, my choice for gift to colleagues,

December 18, 2004

Robert H Buckman

Every once in a while airport bookstores carry something truly extraordinary. This is such a book. It is so utterly perfect, sensible, readable, and on target that Monday I am buying copies to give to colleagues I know are interested in making more of our global information accessible and actionable.

I am sure this book will alter the perceptions of any management team in any domain. At a larger level of international information sharing, what the Swedes are calling M4 IS (multi-national, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional (or multi-domain) information sharing), this book is the single best and most practical book for turning Industrial era organizations into Information era organizations.

There have been other great books that captured some of these ideas early on, from the popular (Alvin and Heidi Toffler's POWERSHIFT, Paul Strassmann's Information PayOff) to the inspired (Thomas Stewart's Wealth of Knowledge, Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth : A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era), but this is the one that I think absolutely must be read by every flag officer and every colonel aspiring to be a flag officer, and their counterparts across all industries.

Heavily marked up, this book is already a classic. The author is brilliant in an elegant understandable manner in making several key points in an action-oriented implementation-facilitating fashion:

1) Technology is the easy part–changing the culture is the hard part (from information hoarding to information sharing)

2) Command and control stovepipes are a big part of the problem–we have to nurture trust and responsibility in all levels by giving all levels access to all information (within reason).

3) Communications, computers, and library services as well as external business intelligence services all have to be rolled together under one executive that has “direct report” relationship with the CEO–it is the networking of humans and their knowledge that has value, not the hardware and software and hard-wired comms lines

4) If you are not rolling over half your software and hardware each year, with nothing in your C4I system more than two years old at any one time, then you are losing capacity, productivity, and profit

5) 85% of what you know cannot be captured in structured knowledge archives–only a living network can allow employees to provide just enough, just in time articulation of answers that can be created in real time–this allows a *dramatic* shortening of the business information answer cycle, from months to hours.

6) If the CEO does not get it, live it, and enforce it, it will not happen.

The author shares with us practical real-world experience that makes this book a real-world manifestor rather than just a visionary proposal. His practical suggestions lead directly to the possibilities of global issue networks such as J.F. Rischard recommends in his HIGH NOON: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, but this book by Robert Buckman is the real deal, a true “revolution in business affairs.”

We've reached a tipping point. The day this book reached airport bookstores, the world changed. From this point forward, we are either implementing this author's wisdom and gaining value, or not.

2004/12/122009/12/04

Review: The Wisdom of Crowds–Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Turns Concept of “National Intelligence” Right Side Up,

December 12, 2004

James Surowiecki

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Edited 10 Jan 05 to point to Robert Buckman's book, Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization which is the implementation counterpart to this book. Those “stake-holders” whose egos are wrapped up in the hoarding of secrets will not like either of these books but the trends lines are clear: sharing beats hoarding, and collective intelligence of the group beats secret “single expert” intelligence just about every time.

Read this book along with Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Tom Atlee's The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace–and if you wish, my own, The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption This book has seriously altered my view of how to organize national decision-making. While I have been exposed to many great thinkers and authors, and formed my own views based on three decades in the defense-intelligence complex where America spends $70B a year on the 10% of the information it can steal, and next to nothing on polling, subject matter experts, and open sources of information, this book was an eye-opener for me.

I disagree with those reviews that dismiss this as “unscientific” or lacking in rigor. This book tells a very important story that could-that should-alter how we made decisions about very important matters with long-term consequences. While the author appears largely unwitting of the body of literature focused on this matter going back to at least Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and H.G. Wells, his book stands as a very valuable self-contained reference that cannot be ignored.

The author examines three broad situations: coordination, aggregation, and cooperation, and in all three concludes, with sufficient and compelling evidence as well as anecdote, that the best answers are from multiple disparate views that have been normalized. The author is also effective in pointing out that most “experts” rarely agree with one another, or get it right in the first place.

To take the simplest example, guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, the author examines how “experts” or “closest individual guess” get within roughly 20 of the right number, while the crowd of disparate individuals–including biased and illiterate individuals–comes within 2. That is a huge benchmark.

This book is relevant to the application of emerging technologies, for example, application oriented networking systems and intelligent networks where P2P puts most of the knowledge at the edge of the network. What hit me with great force is that P2P and intelligent networks cannot be fully effective without an aggregation capability, a super-sized federated database system that scales infinitely–hence disqualifying all of the so-called relational databases.

I have over 20 notes on how to monetize the information in this book, which I consider to be the single most valuable book I have read in the past couple of years, after Thomas Stewart's “The Wealth of Knowledge.” Here is one simple one as citizen blogs and other information including environmental information begins to come on line: why not create a citizen's digital dashboard for cell phones and hand-held devices, so that the barcode on a device creates a full price analysis–not just price in dollars and cents, but price in terms of the greenness of the maker, hidden costs, the human rights and labor relations record of the maker and the seller, etc. I see the day coming when government cannot fund stupid programs because the people put those corporations that build stupid things into bankruptcy, while the labor union pension funds start using their power to invest only in companies committed to sustainable growth. Far-fetched today–this book, and my own understanding of where information technology is headed in the next five years–made me smile.

This is not a “fad” book. It has a great deal of meat. For the hacker set, this is “SNOWCRASH” all grown up, married with children.

Other books with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

2004/11/122009/12/04

Review: The Folly of Empire–What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Balanced Review of Lessons from Roosevet and Wilson,

November 12, 2004

John B. Judis

This is a balanced book, well-grounded in history, with an objective air and a very pleasing integration of specific quotes from both the past and the present. It strips away the false airs of the neo-cons, and with trenchant scholarship shows how deeply ignorant America's neo-conservatives and their leading light are of the lessons of history.

The early portion of the book provides an excellent overview, concise, documented, easy to absorb, of the origins of American imperialism in the early century of Christian millennialism followed by civil millennialism. The chart on page 17 is useful, covering the seven period of various styles of American imperialism or avoidance thereof.

The book documents the explicit rejection by the Founding Fathers of empires based on conquest and distance rule, and of foreign political entanglements.

I especially liked a 1780 quote from Reverend Samuel Cooper that captures my own personal belief in how America should relate to the world: “Conquest is not indeed the aim of these rising states; sound policy must ever forbid it. We have before us an object more truly great and honorable. We seem called by heaven to make a large portion of this globe a seat of knowledge and liberty, of agriculture, commerce, and arts, and what is more important than all, of Christian piety and virtue.”

I find it relevant that Mark Twain, among many others in our history, was a staunch opponent of American imperialism.

The middle portion of the book provides a non-judgmental review of how America was lured into imperialism for largely economic reasons, including a fear of losing access to China as well as coaling stations for a global navy.

At the same time, there is a recurring theme throughout the book of the arrogance and ignorance of white Protestants, who believed-as the Spanish did when they began the genocide in the Americas-that the heathen are savages that must be either absorbed or exterminated.

Especially interesting to me is the concept discussed in the book regarding the early American view that all land not under direct human cultivation was “waste land” whose occupants merited removal as a precondition to “civilized” stewardship [exploitation] of the land.

Theodore Roosevelt is discussed in both negative and positive terms-I have the note in the margin here of Roosevelt as the originator of what can easily be called “macho shit racism”-yet Roosevelt also matured, and ultimately set the stage for a discussion of the League of Nations concept.

Woodrow Wilson is the other historical figure in the center of the book, and his ideal of a collective multinational “conscience of the world” receives a good review. Critical within this section is Wilson early understanding that the “balance of power” model for nations was an inherent unstable model. To this I would add a pointer to my review of Philip Allot, The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State where he documents the absurdity of allowing any crime against humanity to occur within any political boundary as part of the acceptance of sovereign borders.

Other specifics include a discussion of morality as an international force, of the importance of trust in mediators who avoid entanglements, of the CIA's early days sponsoring socialist alternatives to communism that now dominate Europe, and of the US failure to respect the North Vietnamese when they first declared independence and publicly stated their respect for the early American model of governance.

The final portion of the book is a review of modern history. Clinton comes across as disengaged, out-sourcing foreign policy to a very ineffective team, while Bush comes across as provincial and ignorant. In both cases the author notes that underlying conditions have changed, with various bits suggesting to me that there are three major things than have changed: capitalism has become immoral rather than innovative; democracy has become apathetic rather than engaged, and dictators have become the norm as US partners, rather than loathed.

The author links Ahmed Chalibi the thief and Iranian double-agent, with Bernard Lewis the historian fool, in a very compelling manner-both contributed to the debacle of Iraq by deceiving first the neo-conservatives, and then the American people.

The book concludes with some thoughtful assertions on the perils of empire, the legitimate historical and current grievances of the Muslims at large, and the urgency of returning to an American foreign policy that relies on collective security, a collective conscience, and a restoration of America's commitment to the rights of individuals to self-determination.

Category: 5 Star

Review: Inside–A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling in the FBI