1-7 Star Rating – Page 213 – Public Intelligence Blog

Gems of Tough Love, Hope & Inspiration

June 15, 2007

Noam Chomsky

Other speakers have pointed out, as the book's foreword does as well, that most of Chomsky's Op Eds are widely published overseas but not in the US. I completely agree with the general view among intelligent people that the mainstream print and broadcast media, including NPR which now works for Otto Reich, Karl Rove's best post-Nazi pal, are worthless. As Joe Trippi says, “the revolution will not be televised,” nor will it be discovered by any “news hole” reporter whose column inches are subordinate to advertising and info-mercials from the powers that be. I recall with anger that $100,000 full page ads, cash offered up front, were REFUSED by the NYT, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. Shame!

As I usually do with Chomsky's works, I start with the last item, and then go back to the beginning. The heart of this book in my view is two-fold:

1) American intellectuals on both left and right, are timid, ignorant, lazy, and generally a pitiful mess. They have all fallen prey to ideological fantasy or agnostic oblivion. Absent Chomsky, Sy Hersh, and a few others (not counting authors like Francis Moore Lappe and others in the transpartisan mode), our media–broadcast, print, and web–is completely lacking and totally distorted in its failure to be a responsible fourth estate.

2) We the People have the power to change all this. Interestingly (at least to me), as Chompsky's book arrived via UPS I was reading the introduction by Lawrence Goodwyn to “The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America” (Oxford, 1979). Both Chomsky and Goodwyn see clearly that there is a corporate dominance of “the national interest” that is completely at variance, 180 degrees contrary to “the public interest.” This may well be the single most significant political concept we must communicate to every American eligible to vote in 2008.

Chomsky makes much–and in my mind very properly so–of how the people and the varied organizations subordinate to the banks, corporations, and puppet government (both federal and state) have been “domesticated” to believe that the existing system is “as good as it gets” and that nothing can come of a popular revolt. However, and here I draw on Goodwyn, it is clear that the people can reach a breaking points, a point beyond which their suffering cannot be explained by “hard times” or “genetic sloth” or any of the other propaganda terms used to try to keep the 90% that do all the work still for their screwing by CEOs and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve.

Reading Chomsky is like a bracing splash of cold water. Early on in the book, an item dated 1 November 2002 (the dates for each Op-Ed are always present and much appreciated), he offers a modest proposal: that if the US insists on toppling Hussein, that it simply commission Iran to do so, and offer all the support it previously offered to Iraq against Iran. What an insane idea, he points out at the end, only to pointedly suggest that the only idea MORE insane is for the US to go it alone and lightly.

This morning I was re-reading Adda Bozeman's introduction to her brilliant work, “Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft,” and recalling how in 1992 (the same year that I tried to get the USG to take open sources of information seriously) she was very pointedly stating that the heart of strategic intelligence lay in understanding the cultural and religious values of others. Not something CIA has a clue about, especially today when 4 out of 5 “analysts” (more like junior butts in seats) have less than five years experience.

Chomsky is gifted at speaking truth to power, and it is significant that more and more people are reading what he writes–just as more and more people are reading my non-fiction reviews–the American public is now “engaged” and emergent from its slumber. Sadly, when other try to replicate his truth-telling, citing chapter and verse from “Sorrows of Empire,” or “War is a Racket” or “The Fifty Year Would,” or “Why the Rest Hate the West,” we get slammed down. Just yesterday I was told that a superb monograph on Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) would be published officially, but only if I took out all the “conspiracy theory” quotes. The first one, on page 3, quoted General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine of his era, saying he did not like being an enforcer for corporations. So much for speaking the truth in Pentagon circles (where I usually get fairly free rein, to their credit).

Chomsky's other oft-repeated theme, but with all new words in all new Op-Eds tailored to the post 9/11 era, is that it is America that is the global terrorist, America that is the evil-doer. Let me be among those who stand with Chomsky. I declare, as the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction; as a former Marine Corps infantry officer, clandestine spy for the CIA, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, and devoted citizen and father with roots in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chomsky is correct. We are losing the global war of belief systems because we refuse to recognize our grotesque migration from a free people to an evil empire in which the people have no say over what is being done “in their name.” Sun Tzu knew that only those who know BOTH themselves, AND their enemy, will be victories. We know NEITHER ourselves nor our enemies, most of them of our own making. There are reasons for this, but the most important reason lies with our own failing as a public willing to demand the public interest in lieu of special interests.

No one need fear Chomsky, who loves America as much as I do. We need to fear only our inertia as disciplining those who have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, relying on our apathy. The list is long.

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)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception : How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Bush's Brain Why We Fight

2007/06/142009/10/16

Review: International Marine’s Weather Predicting Simplified: How to Read Weather Charts and Satellite Images

5 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Sailing

Great Book, NOT a Substitute for the Five Day Course

June 14, 2007

Michael Carr

This is one of four weather books I recommend, the other three are hot-linked below. It is a truly great book with both white space and color images, easy to read font, and a sensible easy to understand roadmap for integrating satellite imagery, upper air (500 milibar) and surface forecasts and sea state charts.

After I finished the five day course in Advanced Meterology, I created a short guide for myself that I could share with others, and this book was very helpful as a reference to complement the binder that I received with the course.

See also my list of books in my sailing library.

Mariner's Weather
Understanding Weatherfax
The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book: A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

2007/06/142009/10/16

Review: Mariner’s Weather

5 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Sailing

Great Book, for Weather One is Not Enough

June 14, 2007

William P. Crawford

I buy books in pairs or triples, but in the case of weather, both in preparation for the 35-hour Advanced Meterology Course and as a reference library after the fact, I bought four, the other three hot-linked below.

Weather extremes are getting worse, NOAA is under-funded and has trouble getting one 96 hour forecast out, the bottom line is that we are largely on our own where the boat meets the wave offshore.

This book is packed with more detail, including very specific guidance on what to do in relation to specific situations, and absolutely great multiple choice quesitons at the end of each chapter.

This is “the” textbook, but I don't believe in just one book, so I like all four together.

See also my list of books in my sailing library.

Understanding Weatherfax
The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book: A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds
International Marine's Weather Predicting Simplified: How to Read Weather Charts and Satellite Images

2007/06/122009/12/04

Review: Nation of Secrets–The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Our Era's Tom Paine on Common Sense, June 12, 2007

Ted Gup

As one of those who testified to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy, and to earlier Presidential Commissions of excessive government classification, I consider this book to be a treasure. The reviewer that defends government secrecy to protect “sources and methods” knows nothing of them. I was a spy, I helped steal codebooks and program imagery satellites, and I stood up the Marine Corps Intelligence Command.

The author has rendered the Republic an extraordinary service, and from somewhere in heaven Daniel Patrick Moynihan is smiling upon this superb public service.

The author opens the book with an extraordinary snapshot of a single day, Thursday, February 2, 2006, and a stunning array of secret sessions and practices spanning the entire Nation and all of its domains (academic, business, government, law enforcement, religious).

This is a book of case studies, and a book with a constant theme that we must all note: secrecy breeds contempt and distrust, and secrecy blocks the collective intelligence of the people from playing a role in self-governance.

The author excels at discussion not just excessive national security secrecy, but how secrecy is now pervasive, from agricultural contamination and recalls being concealed from the public, to energy policy (Dick Cheney is the first in history to destroy all records of all his guests).

The author reminds us that Thomas Jefferson stated that “Information is the currency of democracy,” and in all that he writes, he shows how secrecy is pathologically altering the relationship between the government and the governed, as well as between all forms of organization and their clients, members, or adherents.

From the security clearance backlog to CIA abuses against its own employees to enlisted men being forbidden to discuss severe deficiencies in their body armor to the concealment of government negligence resulting in wrongful death to the concealment of corporate product deficiencies that kill to the silencing of valid *internal* critics of policies of torture and rendition to the obsessive *reclassification* of information long declassified, the author has written the definitive treatise on how the US Government and all elements of the US (academia, commerce) etc. have forsaken the principles and values of our Founding Fathers.

The author states that secrecy produces errors in judgment and frees government from the fear of being contradicted by the facts.

I admire this book, and this author, very much. This is a book that every citizen voter and citizen consumer should read. We must eradicate 90% of the secrecy in America, and we must redirect 75% of both the military and the intelligence budgets toward waging peace and open source intelligence, including free online and on demand education in 183 languages.

I can best support this author and this book by offering several quotes that he missed and that completely support his presentation:

Amilcar Cabral, African freedom fighter (1924-1973)

Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. … Our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle, this battle against ourselves, this struggle against our own weaknesses … is the most difficult of all. [0}

Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger:

The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information]. [1]

Rodney McDaniel speaking at Harvard University:

Everybody who's a real practitioner, and I'm sure you're not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned. [2]

Ted Shackley in his Memoirs:

In short, the collapse of the communist system in Central Europe has created a new situation for intelligence collectors. I estimate, based in part on my commercial discussions since 1990 in East Germany, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that 80 percent of what is on any intelligence agency's wish list for this area as of 1991 is now available overtly. [3]

General Tony Zinni speaking to a senior national security manager:

80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge. [4]

Robert Steele, in varied speeches and publications:

Do not send a spy where a schoolboy can go.

The problem with spies is they only know secrets.

OSINT changes the rules of the game by making everyone in the audience a player with a legitimate right to collect, produce, and consume public intelligence.

Today, U.S. “intelligence” is upside down and inside out. It is upside down because it relies on satellites in outer space rather than human eyes on the ground. It is inside out because it tries to divine intelligence unilaterally, without first asking anyone else what information they might provide. [5]

Footnotes:
[0] Received in email from an associate.
[1] Daniel Ellsberg, SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
[2] Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to a Harvard University seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley (ed), C3I: Issues of Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991). Page 68.
[3] Ted Shackley, SPYMASTER: My Life in the CIA (Potomac, 2006). Page 282
[4] General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command (CINCCENT), as recounted to the author on 4 April 2006.
[5] Forbes.com, within “Blank Slate,” as Edited By David M. Ewalt and Michael Noer and published 04-18-06.

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
C3I: Issues of Command and Control
Spymaster: My Life in the CIA
The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose
Battle Ready (Tom Clancy Commanders)
On Intelligence : Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

See my comment for URL to 16 pages of testimony in 1993 on this topic.

2007/06/102009/12/04

Review: Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition)

5 Star, Security (Including Immigration)

First Rate, Post 9-11 Update, One of Two Core Works

June 10, 2007

Joseph S. Nye

First, this is a five-star tutorial on international relations that has been most recently updated after 9-11. If I were to recommend only two books on international relations, for any adult including nominally sophisticated world travelers, this would be the first book; the second would be Shultz, Godson, & Quester's wonderful edited work, Security Studies for the 21st Century.

I really want to stress the utility of this work to adults, including those like myself who earned a couple of graduate degrees in the last century (smile). I was surprised to find no mention of the author's stellar service as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council–not only has he had full access to everything that can be known by secret as well as non-secret means, but he has kept current, and this undergraduate and affordable paperback was a great way for me–despite the 400+ books I've read (most of them reviewed on Amazon.com) in the past four plus years–to come up to speed on the rigorous methodical scholarly understanding of both historical and current theories and practices in international relations. This book is worth anyone's time, no matter how experienced or educated.

Each chapter has a very satisfactory mix of figures, maps, chronologies, and photos–a special value is a block chart showing the causes for major wars or periods of conflict at the three levels of analysis–international system, national, and key individual personalities, and I found these quite original and helpful.

Excellent reference and orientation work. Took five hours to read, with annotation–this is not a mind-glazer, it's a mind-exerciser.

2007/06/092015/04/26

Review: Dark Alliance–The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

CIA Case Officer from Central American Era Validates This Book, June 9, 2007

Gary Webb

I am probably the only reviewer who was a clandestine case officer (three back to back tours), who participated in the Central American follies as both a field officer and a desk officer at CIA HQS, who is also very broadly read.

With great sadness, I must conclude that this book is truthful, accurate, and explosive.

The book lacks some context, for example, the liberal Saudi funding for the Contras that was provided to the National Security Council (NSC) as a back-door courtesy.

There are three core lessons in this book, supported by many books, some of which I list at the end of this review:

1) The US Government cannot be trusted by the people. The White House, the NSC, the CIA, even the Justice Department, and the Members of Congress associated with the Administration's party, are all liars. They use “national security” as a pretext for dealing drugs and screwing over the American people.

2) CIA has come to the end of its useful life. I remain proud to have been a clandestine case officer, but I see now that I was part of the “fake” CIA going through the motions, while extremely evil deeds were taking place in more limited channels.

3) In the eyes of the Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Honduran people, among many others, the US Government, as represented by the CIA and the dark side Ambassadors who are partisan appointees rather than true diplomats, is evil. It consorts with dictators, condones torture, helps loot the commonwealths of others, runs drugs, launders money, and is generally the bully on the block.

I have numerous notes on the book, and will list just a few here that are important “nuggets” from this great work:

1) The CIA connection to the crack pandemic could be the crime of the century. It certainly destroys the government's moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

2) The fact that entrepreneur Ricky Ross went to jail for life, while his supplier, Nicaraguan Blandon, was constantly protected by CIA and the Department of Justice, is a travesty.

3) Nicaragua, under Somoza, was the US Government's local enforcer, and CIA was his most important liaison element. As long as we consort with 44 dictators (see Ambassador Palmer's “The Real Axis of Evil,” we should expect to be reviled by the broader populations.

4) I believe that beginning with Henry Kissinger, the NSC and the CIA have had a “eugenics” policy that considers the low-income blacks to be “expendable” as well as a nuisance, and hence worthy of being targeted as a market for drugs to pull out what income they do have.

5) I believe that CIA was unwitting of the implications of crack, but that Congress was not. The book compellingly describes the testimony provided to Congress in 1979 and again in 1982, about the forthcoming implications of making a cocaine derivative affordable by the lowest income people in our Nation.

6) The Administration and Congress, in close partnership with the “mainstream media,” consistently lied, slandered witnesses to the truth, and generally made it impossible for the truth to be “heard.”

7) The ignorance of the CIA managers about the “ground truth” in Nicaragua and Honduras, and their willingness to carry out evil on command from the White House, without actually understanding the context, the true feelings of the people, or even the hugely detrimental strategic import of what they were about to do to Los Angeles, simply blow me away. We need to start court-martialling government employees for being stupid on the people's payroll.

8) CIA officers should not be allowed to issue visas. When they are under official cover they are assigned duty officer positions, and the duty officer traditionally has access to the visa stamp safe for emergencies (because the real visa officers are too lazy to be called in for an emergency).

9) I recently supported a movie on Ricky Ross, one that immediately won three awards in 2006 for best feature-length documentary, and I have to say, on the basis of this book, that Rick Ross was clearly not a gang member; was a tennis star and all-around good guy, was trying to make school grades; was disciplined, professional, and entrepreneurial. He did not create the cocaine, he did not smuggle it into the country, he simply acted on the opportunity presented to him by the US Government and its agent Blandon.

10) There is a connection between CIA, the private sector prison managers in the US, and prisoners. This needs a more careful look.

11) Clinton's bodyguards (many of whom have died mysteriously since then) were fully witting of Bill and Hillary Clinton's full engagement in drug smuggling into the US via Arkansas, and CIA's related nefarious activities.

12) CIA not only provided post-arrest white washes for its drug dealers, but they also orchestrated tip-offs on planned raids.

13) Both local police departments, especially in California, and the US Government, appear to have a standard “loot and release” program where drug dealers caught with very large amounts of cash (multiple millions) are instantly freed in return for a quit claim on the money.

14) CIA Operations Officers (clandestine case officers) lied not just to the FBI and Justice, but to their own CIA lawyers.

15) DEA in Costa Rica was dirtier than most, skimming cash and protecting drug transports.

The book ends with a revelation and an observation.

The revelation: just prior to both the Contra drug deals and the CIA's ramping up in Afghanistan, which now provides 80% of the world's heroin under US administration, the CIA and Justice concluded a Memorandum of Understanding that gave CIA carte blanche in the drug business.. The author says this smacked of premeditation, and I agree.

The observation: here is a quote from page 452: ” …the real danger the CIA has always presented–unbridled criminal stupidity, clouded in a blanked of national security.”

Shame on us all. It's time to clean house.

Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition
The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War : An Undercover Odyssey
Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA
From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)

2007/05/302009/12/04

Review: Blessed Unrest–How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

5 Star, Democracy, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Pleasantly Brief for a Magnum Opus–Opens the Door to the Future, May 30, 2007

Paul Hawken

Edit of 16 Apr 08 to add five more links.

I ordered this book last December after hearing Paul Hawkin brief on the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), and before receiving the book, heard him speak again in Seattle on how governments and corporations are stealing the future (our challenge) while the Internet and WISER specifically are bringing all of together to put down the destructive minorities–he called this the Earth's immune system, and has a chapter in the book about it.

This book could have been a 750-page “big book” but the author has made it blessedly concise. You can join WISER and see everything else there.

He tells us that Lincoln was the first President to sign legislation to protect nature, and Theodore Roosevelt the first to create a wildlife preserve.

He puts the creationists down while providing a marvelous review of the path from Emerson to Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King. Truly a wonderful tour of the horizons of our pioneers for good intentions and respect for nature.

He directly connects environmental advocacy with advocacy for social justice.

He considers the 1990's rather than the 1970's to have been our age of awakening, and points out that today we have 1000 times more people than 7,000 years ago, and each person is using 100 to 1000 times more energy than their ancestors.

He teaches us that the Luddites have been terribly mis-represented; that they were not against technology, but rather in favor of full employment and dignity for every person. Lionel Tiger, in Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, makes the large case against the industrial era for destroying kinship, trust, and human dignity, See my list on transpartisan books for the healing works.

He does not repeat anything from Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution or The Ecology of Commerce. This is a completely new work, and one could call it a “call to action” for all of us, as well as directions for joining the largest movement on the planet, all for one and one for all (WISER).

We learn that Rockefeller treated renewable energy as a competitor and was ruthless against it. I still cannot comprehend why the CEO of Exxon is oblivious to the value of going green with all his ill-gotten profits from the past few years of insanity. Exxon is portrayed in this book as the greatest of all miscreants, spending tens of millions each year to bury the truth and spawn lies. I know for a fact that the CEO of Exxon is aware of all the knowledge available to him, and has chosen to isolate himself from reality and stick to the traditions of the past. He will go down with his ship when we all start boycotting Exxon as I have begun to do.

The very few repeated themes from past works focus on how business had always created value but never been held accountable for the true cost of what they produce, since they are so clever as well as duplicitous in legalizing the externalization of most of their costs (not talking small business here, just the 10% mega-business element that scorns humanity).

The author calls for third party objective science that is neither politicized nor fanaticized by religious zealots. I agree, and my several books tell us how to do this, I will mention only two: The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption and THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest.

The author discusses the direct relationship between climate change and poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, the top three high-level threats that the secret intelligence community refuses to focus on.

The author contributes to the growing literature on how the USA has been an aggressor Nation, and in the case of Mexico, specifically provoked the war that led to the Treaty of Guadalupe–Mexico has fought back asymmetrically ever since, and it can be safely said that they have taken back their lost land while multiple Administrations have condoned illegal immigration.

We learn that Rosa Parks was trained in civil disobedience prior to her momentous stand. We are reminded by the author that Thoreau said that if just one man withdraws his support from an unjust government, it is the beginning of a cycle that will grow.

The author gives us an absolutely superb chapter on the deep knowledge of indigenous peoples, and one can but weep at the genocide, not just of peoples, as I had understood it up to know, but of hundreds of years of acquired knowledge about how to live within nature. He points out that languages, like species, are disappearing, and every lost language, like every lost species, sharply reduces our access to useful knowledge.

I could go on, but the book is a real gem, and merits a complete and careful reading. The author ends with four time frames, the timeframes of commerce, of culture, of governance, and of nature, and tells us about blessed unrest as the Nation's immune system. If Silent Spring was the first call to action, this book is not just a renewed call to action, but a roadmap as well.

A 112 page annex on Wiser Earth is essential supporting documentation.

Category: 1-7 Star Rating

Review: Interventions