4.0 out of 5 stars 5 for Superficial Overview, 3 for Pretense, May 13, 2012
It is unfortunate that Amazon's superb “Look Inside the Book” has been limited by the publisher to only the introduction, as I would like the potential buyer to have a much greater feel for the book that the reviews or the few front pages can offer, before making a decision.
Here is the bottom line: nothing in this book is a new insight, and I am astonished by the claimed editorial reviews, as they seem oblivious of the decades of work by others in the areas of co-evolution, panarchy, collective intelligence, hybrid governance, open source everything, small is beautiful, human scale, Epoch B, resilience, intelligence at the edges of the network, etcetera. In other words, this book is more of a “quickie” book, not at all the “deeply researched” effort that is claimed, and it is at best a survey that barely scratches the surface of my two master lists, of lists of book reviews I have done here at Amazon, a means of reading all my reviews sorted into many categories (including the future of democracy, of capitalism, etcetera). The positive list is the one to focus on for everything that this author attempts to convey, and points to many of the sources that the book does not cite. Both lists were the foundation for my 2010 book listed below after my name. The negative list documents the obvious, but with a structure that has been lacking in critiques to date, most are incoherent for lack of an analytic model. To get to the link, just search for full name of the list as shown below.
Eric Rosenbach is a former academic who is now deputy assistant secretary of defence in Washington. Aki Peritz used to work for the CIA and now advises the Third Way think tank. Their book, therefore, is not a breathless account of terrorist-hunting nor the sensational inside story of how, in Obama’s words, ‘We got him’ (bin Laden). Rather, it is an exposition of legal, bureaucratic, political and military developments within the US following 9/11, illustrated by summaries of how various terrorists were killed or captured. If you want thrills and spills, go elsewhere, but if you are a student of counter-terrorism or are interested in the legal limbo of rendition, detention and targeted killings, you should probably read it.
The title refers to the process of finding terrorists — establishing who they are — then fixing their whereabouts, then finishing them off. The first two are generally intelligence tasks, the last military, and for the process to work it requires careful co-ordination. This may seem obvious but it wasn’t always so; the book usefully catalogues missed opportunities pre-9/11 for killing or capturing bin Laden and other leading terrorists. It also points out that there were around 70 renditions — US seizures of wanted terrorists from third countries with the agreement of host governments — before 9/11, under Clinton. ‘Extraordinary renditions’ are seizures without the consent of the host, most if not all of which have taken place post-9/11.
4.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent FIrst Effort, Misses a Lot of the Crime and Complexity,March 21, 2012
I agreed to review this book, which was a gift. Normally I do not do non-fiction, but the topic of this book — the abject total corruption of our entire political system (from the two-party tyranny to the bloated corrupt government) is important to me, so I agreed.
As a first effort, it is a fine book, and certainly valuable as a “lite” telling of the American story of legalized crime and conspiracy. Unfortunately, it does not go nearly far enough, once again proving that non-fiction is much scarier than fiction. It's hard to get too excited about a fictional version when you have all lived through the real thing.
To the author's great credit, I learned things from this book–always my objective–and it is therefore more than fiction, it is a window into reality. The book ends with six questions for book clubs and overall is very well presented. I would have been more impressed if the author had listed some of the books below as sources–I get the feeling going through the book that the author drew more on Internet and media sources than on actual books. There are important observations throughout the book, not least of which is the fact that Obama gets away with things that a Republican white president would never get away with. He is the perfect house servant for the criminals that consider the USA to be their personal looting preserve.
Here are non-fiction books (you can just read my summary reviews, and also explore at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, among the 98 categories in which I read, many of them focused on the deep corruption that characterizes all organizations we rely on:
4.0 out of 5 stars Lacks Visualization and Genealogy, A Good Start,March 3, 2012
I eagerly anticipated receipt of this book, but when it arrived I had two immediate reactions:
01) A serious work that offers new information about American corporations betraying the public interest; and
02) Totally lacking in visualizations and “trees” showing both the family trees of those like the Bushes that started out and stayed Nazi sympathizers; and those who entered the USA under CIA sponsorship after the war, and spawned multiple generations of neo-Nazi mind-sets with assets able to influence public policy.
Then I noticed Howard Zinn's jacket blurb (“A valuable history…shocking and sobering…deserves to be widely read”) and I mention that to make the point that my four star grade is one of disappointment at what could have been, NOT disappointment at what is. This is a very useful serious book, it needs to be redone.
I totally agree with another reviewer who expresses a desire for footnotes rather than endnotes. For works of this kind that are both controversial and revelatory, the notes needs to be as close to the text as possible.
This entire book strongly reinforces my long-standing view that every nation needs to have a very strong counterintelligence cadre to guard against both religious and corporate treason. The US was clearly infected with Nazi ideology, sympathy, and corruption, and this has clearly carried over into today's corporate immunity from government regulation, and the achievement of the virtual corporate state in the USA — in a word, neo-fascism.
The book is an excellent mix of material I was not familiar with, and material I have have encountered before. The latter tracks with what I have read from others, thus in my lay view authenticating the mew material.
For myself, the most interesting materials covers corporate treason in refusing to provide materials or allocate man-hours and machine-hours as requested for the war effort — this is another side of the corporate face, complementing the side that gains great profit from war.
What is missing from this book that would have fascinated me — apart from the visualizations and timelines — is the deeper story of how US corporate nazi sympathies and international banking zionist sympathies eventually converged into the 1% against the 99%.
The CIA is a constant in this book, but having worked for the CIA myself, I have to remind the reader that there are at least five CIAs: the White House CIA, the Wall Street CIA, the “nice” CIA that really does try to do good intelligence, the covert operations CIA (paramilitary, influence operations) and the rendition and torture CIA. A future President might well wish to break up the CIA and start over — I absolutely consider 90% of the CIA to be earnest and honest. A proper counterintelligence agency (what the FBI is supposed to be but is not) would be nailing down government, corporate, and religious traitors.
Allen Dulles is made out to be a traitor in this book. For me this is a useful teaching point. If one takes every major leader across the public and private sector, and examines their actual decisions, what are the criteria for establishing the degree to which they are loyal to the Constitution, what are the sources one must develop to make that determination, why are those sources not in use? To this one must add the deeper question of how education, intelligence / counter-intelligence, and research should be managed to achieve the highest possible ethics and avoid “contamination” by authoritarian and genocidal mind-sets.
So I suppose my bottom line on this book is that it is an eye-opener, but it does not go far enough in “processing” and in “visualizing” the information to help us lay people understand with greater precision the degree to which our public and private sectors are corrupted by the Nazi orientation – to which one must add today the Zionist orientation, the “new world order” orientation, the neo-Nazi eugenics/Forced Population Reducation orientation, and so on. Who actually represents “We the People” appears to be unclear and dangerously distant from the public interest.
4.0 out of 5 stars Bleak – a Righteous Personal Effort,March 3, 2012
I am a huge fan of photographic books, and I find this one to be very worthwhile, but not quite a five star offering because it does not have quite the diversity — or reading clarity — that I would have liked.
Never-the-less, it is a vital contribution to the literature on Afghanistan, and what does come out from the book, a mix of photographs by one man and short novella stories by a number of invited authors, is the bleakness of what has been wrought in Afghanistan, and most especially, the human toll in “collateral damage” of children and men (mostly) who have lost one leg and all too often both legs to land mines.
4.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Six on Detail, Loses Credibility on Mistakes,February 20, 2012
I have never been one to seek out conspiracy books. Reading in 98 categories, it was not until the combination of 9/11 and the multiple legalized crime bubbles that exploded in 2008-2010 that I finally realized I had been oblivious to the obvious that books such as this have been addressing for years, with more mainstream books finally starting to come into play.
This book has mind-boggling detail, most of it credible. It loses considerable credibility in making truly outrageous claims such as Executive Order 12333 being the order that authorized the framing and then incarceration of Lyndon LaRouche, an individual who cannot be stereo-typed. Indeed, this is a man that is so complex, stepping back and forth over the line — the very thin line — that separates sheer genius from errant lunacy — that I strongly recommend a reading of his Wikipedia page before reading the book. LaRouche is a convicted criminal — I see that — but I respectfully submit that every partner in Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank and others is an unindicted unconvicted criminal solely because the US Government lacks the intelligence and integrity to go after them.
Startling, Offers a Wealth of New Information, February 19, 2012
EDIT of 6 May 2012 to acknowledge fixed made by publisher for new edition after review, change title, and increase to five stars.
I was given this book as a gift. I do not normally seek-out conspiracy literature, but in the aftermath of 9/11 and all I have learned about that (search for < 9/11 books dvd source=phibetaiota >, I am now shifting from my long held view that given a choice between incompetence and conspiracy, one should go with incompetence every time. This book brings me closer to a 50-50 split, but I am still on the 70-30 side giving incompetence the edge.
The best thing I can say about this book is that while there are others addressing Gladio (the Italian secret unit), this may be the first book that really strings everything together, adds, connects, spreculates, in a more thorough way going beyond Italy to include the rest of Europe and to my surprise, Sweden, than the few prior books. This book is also the most current, to include the Libya take-down and to warn that Turkey is next. The book does not address Syria.
Perhaps the most substantive point in favor of the book's value is the detailed and documented manner in which it outlines how Italy spawned the most active secret campaign because it is the one place where the Catholic Church and the Mafia have their homes, and can come together with NATO, big business, the neo-Nazi extreme right, and the intelligence and security services whose budget inevitably benefit from false flag attacks in the absence of real threats.
As much as the book troubles me with detailed documented examples of a long series of false flag attacks including assassination of leaders in Sweden and elsewhere (and at one time targeting Charles DeGaul), I am inclined to think that the author makes an unwarranted assumption that the “legitimate” stay-behind networks created after World War II morphed into a “killer / false flag” network over time everywhere. While this is absolutely proven beyond a doubt for Italy, it is not proven for the rest of Europe.
Because the author relied on second-hand quotes and did not read the original, this book has a poor misrepresentation of the findings of my friend Cees Wiebes' book, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Studies in Intelligence History). The focus of Cee's book was on the inadequacy of convention intelligence services with respect to peacekeeping intelligence; and that the rest of the mess was a mix of sheer incompetence within the UN, big power politics, and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington, D.C. That sounds righter to me and is consistent with my own review of the English-language version that I link to here.
I am constantly astonished as I read this book, finding nuggets of documented information that I had no idea were out there. I think frequently while reading this book that it would be truly wonderful to have the ability to ingest this and many other books like it into a professional intelligence evaluation facility, create the maps that connects the dots — people, places, organizations, dates, and such — and get to the bottom of so many crimes against humanity that have been carried out by order of Western powers — certainly co-equal to the crimes against humanity from the “lesser” powers in Rwanda and Burundi.
The author provides details on the Russians using a PSYOP at the end of WWII, creating the myth of the Hitler redoubt, with the specific intent of distracting General Eisenhower and gaining time to take Berlin — their plan worked.
I read with amusement the author's assessment of the National War College as the place where we park right-wing nutcases/neocons, and knowing some of them myself, cannot disagree–that is however a disservice to the 90% of NDU that is solidly in the middle.
The author is provocative as he weaves his documented tale about the degree to which all left of center groups were penetrated in the aftermath of WWII, and I see how easily the intelligence and security services might have found it to manipulate groups into doing violence — or into taking the blame for false flag violence. On the basis of this book as well as others, I speculate that at least half the “threat” against which the USA has devoted considerable time, treasure, and trust, has been FALSE — self-made.
The death of most significant Swedes standing up for Palestine gets my attention.
The “coincidence” of police training exercises in both London and Madrid, each closely associated with the actual train bombing that takes place in and around the exercise area, is profoundly disturbing — we now know that Dick Cheney scheduled the counter-terrorism exercise MONTHS before “the day,” and as I write this, I marvel at the ignorance of the public and the perhaps justified arrogance of those who create false terror to advance their own selfish ends.
I learn that Steve Pieczenik, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, was a Carter trouble-shooter, and I find this fascinating because the same Dr. Pieczenik came on record to call the CIA-JSOG raid to kill Bin Laden a false operation (Bin Laden having died a decade ago, a patsy was killed instead) and to say that there is new evidence against Dick Cheney in relation to 9/11.
I put the book down a bit frustrated — it is hard to make sense of so much detail, it really needs to be visualized with timelines and so on. However, this is a world-class book in terms of documentation, and setting aside the hyperbole, assumptions, and many small mistakes, I certainly recommend it.
We are all beginning to learn that governments lie to their publics as a matter of routine; that banks and corporations lie, cheat, and steal more more than the Mafia; and that the Catholic Church may be the world's primary money-laundering network. It is in the context of a public slowly awakening to reality that I recommend this book as an excellent place to begin exploring and raise it to five stars.
I am limited to ten links. Here are two more, to browse my other 1,700 plus reviews visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where all reviews link back to their book's Amazon page.
Startling, Offers a Wealth of New Information, February 19, 2012