1-7 Star Rating – Page 243 – Public Intelligence Blog

Fifteen Distinct Instances of FACT–a Major Contribution,

April 14, 2006

Sander Hicks

This is one of a number of 9-11 truth movement books that I have reviewed. The bottom line is clear and supported by other books: the U.S. Government had fore-knowledge of 9-11; the FBI and the CIA are a combination of inept and corrupt; and the 9-11 Commission was a deliberate cover-up.

Two of the facts the author cites, while brought out by others, have a special cachet in this particular book:

1) John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial in June 2001; and

2) The 9-11 Fund for victims was managed by a quasi-compromised individual whose task was to get them all (at least 90%) to sign up, because the acceptance of compensation came with a quit claim against the US Government and any further legal action, a compelling indicator, in my mind, of guilt by implication.

Here are a few things that stayed with me from this author's worthy effort:

1) Summary of what we lost on 9-11 from Dr. Hecht: “3000 New Yorkers, half the Constitution, and most of the Republic.”

2) Key people like Dave Frasca at FBI that blocked all efforts to stymie the 9-11 attacks, and Francis Taylor at Department of State, director of security (with Ambassadorial rank) and party to special deals with Pakistan, were never forced to testify in detail.

3) 9-11 Commission deliberately started its review in 1996 to leave out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing where evidence exists that the FBI built the bomb and it was all part of an operation that went bad.

4) Both the 9-11 Commission and other reviews have failed to go back to the BCCI Bank scandal, where the BCCI was a joint Pakistani-CIA bank to channel funds to Afghanistan (and not incidentally, to jihad terrorists in the making)

5) The BCCI was the bank that bought George Bush II's stock in Harkin when he was a failure and needed help.

6) Sixteen (16) reporters and investigators died under mysterious circumstances while investigating the BCCI story.

7) Mueller may have been rewarded with FBI Director post for his role in blocking BCCI investigation.

8) 9-11 may have originally been planned as a nuclear attack under the direction of the Pakistani nuclear genius now allegedly under house arrest, and “downgraded” to the WTC [note: there are numerous allegations that all the gold and other valuables in the WTC were evacuated in advance, and the most important allies of the Administration were not in the building that morning–it was, in other words, expendable, and also valuable as pretext for war (Jim Bamford's term, see my review of that book). NOTE: The author suggests that the Pakistani's not only made the point to the Bush Administration that an attack would be good for the Administration, while relieving some pressures in Pakistan, but also negotiated the down-grade, receiving in turn further assistance toward their nuclear arms race with India. Lest anyone doubt this, please note that Zbigniew Brezinski specifically gave the Pakistanis a nuclear bye in return for help against the Soviet in Afghanistan. Regardless of the party in party, the political leadership in America is clearly willing to sell its soul and sacrifice American lives for what it perceives to be strategic gains for its own selfish elite).

9) Israel and Egypt warned the US in strong terms, as did Germany and Russian, within weeks prior to the actual attacks. The US Government chose not to act on those warnings, perhaps because it wanted the attacks to succeed.

10) Al Qaeda and the Neo-Conservatives actually share some viewpoints and have a symbiotic relationship.

11) The Muslim Brotherhood is close to the CIA, and goes back many decades with the neo-Nazis. as both share an abiding hatred for the Jews and Israel (this suggests that the many stories about US skin-heads supporting Al Qaeda terrorists are plausible).

12) Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff is dirty as sin. He defended terrorist financier Dr. Magby Elamir, is a “dishonest bastard” who went along with Vince Foster suicide cover-up, and was fast-tracked to the top and via the judge's circuit as part of the overall deal between those who sin and those who condone.

13) Governor Jeb Bush PERSONALLY showed up to confiscate flight school records in Florida days after 9-11, and then took action to make them forever irretrievable.

14) Florida is called by some in the know as “Terrorland” where two Floridas co-exist–a normal Florida (that is to say, the walled city/golf courses with water features of the well to do, and the slums of the poor), and a second Florida consisting of CIA training camps, banks approved by the Government to launder drug money for Wall Street, and flight schools and airports for discreet arms-drugs-money transfers–and even Miami International Airport, where world-class assholes can be “pre-cleared” for entry to the US “at the convenience of the U.S. Government.” Indeed, the connection between Florida, drugs, and the U.S. Government is so strong that in one uncoordinated inter-agency assault on an arriving Lear Jet loaded with drugs, DEA senior executive Mike Brasseltine was in the co-pilot's seat. [Ugly side note: Henry Kissinger is on record as supporting Third World eugenics or “depopulation,” there is mounting evidence that the white wealthy elite consider drugs an excellent albeit totally racsist means of “de-colorizing” of America.

15) In passing the author points out that the 9-11 Commissioners, with one exception, did not meet the Congressional mandate that they all be free of any association with the Bush Administration.

The author also does magnificently in discussing “suppressed histories” as a “standard” U.S. Government operating procedure. Lest you think this is fanciful, see my reviews of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'. The FACT is that the U.S. Government and its corporate partners and its international criminal allies is routinely deceiving the American people and mis-serving We the People.

I have reviewed a number of 9-11 books and DVDs, and I stake my personal integrity on the following statement:

We cannot prove conclusively that Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein conspired to not only let 9-11 happen, but use a missile on the Pentagon and controlled demolitions to murder thousands, destroy evidence (of missing 2.3 trillion in Pentagon, SEC investigaions in NYC), and commit multiple counts of insurance fraud. I am however convinced beyond a shadow a doubt that America needs a Truth and Reconcilation Commission, a Public Invetigation, and that all those who were not properly interviewed (most) or interviewed at all (even more) must be brought into the open. I believe this to be the crime of the century, treasonous in every respect, and I do not want Dick Cheney to have the pleasure of dying before we can investigate and if proven, convict and incarcerate.

In DVD's, “Loose Change” is an absolute must but not offered on Amazon.
See also:
9/11 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions
9/11: Press For Truth
9/11 – The Myth and the Reality
Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11
Improbable Collapse: The Demolition of Our Republic
The Toxic Clouds Of 9/11: A Looming Health Disaster
Fahrenheit 9/11

2006/04/122009/12/04

Review: The Vermont Manifesto (Paperback)

5 Star, Democracy

Leading Voice for Non-Violent Secession from the Union,

April 12, 2006

Thomas H. Naylor

The US federal government is failing to serve the people, and according to the precepts of the American Republic, that gives the people the right to abolish the government. In the case of the Second Vermont Republic, the author and his very thoughtful colleagues are proposing instead to succeed from the Federal Union that is not Federal anymore–the federal government is now a “hired hand” for Wall Street and a servant to dictators of Saudi Arabia as well as the Israeli lobby.

Professor Naylor, also a successful software businessman many years ago, is a citizen-philosopher and by no stretch of the imagination could he be labeled “fringe.” In his case, radical is the opposite of reactionary, and exactly where we need to be.

The elements of the Vermont Manifesto are ten in total: political independence; grass roots democracy; nonviolence; environmental integrity; sustainable development; regional trade; sustainable agriculture; rail revitalization; quality education; and wellness.

The premises of the Vermont Manifesto, apart from recognition of the corruption and immorality that prevail on Wall Street and the energy industry and their servants in Congress and the White House, is that big is bad and small is good. This is totally consistent with the end of Peak Oil and the need to get back to localized sustainable energy and food production that does not need to be transported great distances. The Vermont Manifesto also recognizes that evil done by the American Empire “in our name” ultimately comes back to pillage and loot the state-level commonwealths.

Lest anyone think this book is “fringe” I would point to my many other reviews (I am the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about foreign policy–I would not be reviewing this book if it were not fundamental), but especially to my review of, and the book itself, Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America and more recently, a swath of books on the Iraq blunders and the immorality of George Bush and Dick Cheney, such as:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage

It is clear to me that sanity is re-asserting itself in the Pacific Northwest and the far Northeast. This specific book would be useful to every single state in America, and I have a specific question that every single state should put on its 2008 ballot:

“Should we join a Constitutional Convention to discuss the abolishment of the present government and the reconstitution of the Americas as a new Republic that restores representative democracy and moral capitalism?”

There are 27 secessionist movements in the USA, among which Vermont and the Pacific Northwest are the strongest and most reasoned. No President can take office in 2009 without fully understanding the legitimate grievances represented by this book and the varied secessionist movements.

There is another angle from which to appreciate this book as well. The federal government has failed to adapt, as Katrina and other disasters have shown us. The some of the following books on how a combination of Ron Paul's restoration of Jeffersonian diplomacy and a regionalization of America might increase our resilience, especially if combined with an end to absentee landlords and a greening of America.

The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)
Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series)

2006/04/102009/12/04

Review: Spying on the Bomb–American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (Hardcover)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Best of Intentions, As Flawed as Its Subject,

April 10, 2006

Jeffrey T. Richelson

The author does good work, within the limits of what can be known, and I have to recognize his diligence with five stars, but this is one of those books that is maddening in three ways:

1) It documents how bureacratically pedestrian the U.S. Intelligence Community has been. Spying on the bomb has not been a “calling” it has been a routine job using pedestrian means, and with zero accountability for faliing to be successful.

2) The book is maddening in other ways. In 2004 the CIA gets a walk-in with a thousand pages on the Iranian nuclear program, and two years later they are still trying to determine if the documents are fake–or is it that they provided the documents in the first place (see my review of “State of War”) and are now confronted by their own returning paper?

3) Most maddening of all is the complete failure of this book, and its subject the US Intelligence Community, and the policy leadership of the USA, to come to grips with reality. The nuclear bomb or nuclear power in the hands of North Korea or Iran are about as great a threat to the USA as Fidel Castro deciding to invade Miami with 10,000 doctors. 1000 car bombs in the right places (most overseas, such as in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela), 1000 det cords with C-4 around the right choke points (port cranes, bridge struts, railroad loading yard circles) are vastly more threatening to the US. A nuclear bomb might take out a city–an asymmetric attack by highly motivated suicidal terrorists will not only bypass all of our defenses, but it will take out our economy. Our wages are already back where they were in 1962 (sixty two). Hurricane Katrina had the force of a nuclear exploision and not only is the White House ignoring that disaster, but it has not impacted on the rest of the country. The USA has no strategy and no grasp of reality–our policies right now are a combination of ideological fantasy, deep insider corruption, and pedestrian bureaucratic “going through the motions.” Shame on all of us.

By way of example:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

Incidentally, terrorism is #9 on the list of high-level threats to humanity, poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation are 1-3, above war. Our government now resembles the DVD Idiocracy. The only good news is that CIA discovered its integrity on Iran and many of us appear to have stopped the lunatic intentions of Dick Cheney to carry on with the Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.

2006/04/092009/12/04

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

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

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.

2006/04/092009/12/04

Review: The Battle for Hearts and Minds–Using Soft Power to Undermine Terrorist Networks (Washington Quarterly Readers) (Paperback)

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Diplomacy

Several excellent contributions, fails to connect to open source intelligence,

April 9, 2006

Alexander T. J. Lennon

This is a pretty good volume from 2003, with a good mix of academics, journalists, and practitioners. The most useful pieces for me personally were on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which manages the Voice of America.

On balance this is a solid reference on all but two of the aspects of soft power: it completely neglects the importance of getting a grip on historical and cultural reality through open source intelligence (OSINT) and also neglects the strategic bottom line that demands an educated American public that is fully informed about the real world and demanding of intelligent policy choices.

The book certainly does well with the limitations of military power, the importance of nation building, the urgency of having a massive capability to do stabilization and reconstruction operations as needed, and the critical roles that public diplomacy and foreign assistance could, but do not, play in winning hearts and minds.

Of special interest to me was the failing report card on the broadcasting board of governors, whose equipment is 30 years old in many cases. I applauded the informed judgement of the author who made the case, based on experience, for keeping the short wave and middle band capabilities that too few understand is essential for Africa and other locations.

Across the book it becomes clear that the US needs to upgrade the Combatant Commanders or mirror them with a civilian coordinator for non-military strategy, power, and resources. As someone who grew up overseas with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), and served in three Embassies overseas, it is crystal clear to me that we need to double the Department of State, in part by reconstituting USIA as a separate organization, and by placing USIA, the BBG, and a new Open Source Agency (for collecting and making sense of all public information in all languages all the time) in a tight partnership. We need to double and triple aid, develop a peacekeeping from the sea program, as well as the ability to do multiple Berlin Airlifts.

This is a good basic book for anyone thinking seriously about “soft power,” a term popularized by Joe Nye, whose varied books I have reviewed and recommend very highly.

2006/04/062009/12/04

Review: World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series) (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Consciousness & Social IQ, Education (General)

Essential to Thinking About Collective Intelligence,

April 6, 2006

H. G. Wells

Edit of 16 Jan 07 to add links.

This volume, reprinted in the 1990's with a superb introductory essay, is still a gem, and extremely relevant to the emerging dialog about Collective Intelligence that includes the works of people like Howard Bloom (Global Brain), Pierre Levy (Collective Intelligence), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), and James Surowieki (The Wisdom of the Crowds).

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Wisdom of Crowds

The Internet has finally made possible the vision of H. G. Wells, as well as the vision of Quincy Wright (who called for a World Intelligence Center in the 1950's, using only open sources of information).

This specific work is the first brick in a global networked brain that is also linked to eliminating poverty and war and producing what Alvin and Heidi Toffler call “Revolutionary Wealth” (also the title of their book coming out in April 2006). Thomas Stewart (“Wealth of Knowledge”) and Barry Carter (“Infinite Wealth”) are among my other heros in this specific genre of the literature. See my List on Collective Intelligence, and my reviews of all these other books.

Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era

Published since my view, and highly pertinent:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

Category: 1-7 Star Rating

Review: The Big Wedding–9/11, the Whistle Blowers, and the Cover-up (Paperback)

Review: The Vermont Manifesto (Paperback)

Review: Spying on the Bomb–American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (Hardcover)

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: The Battle for Hearts and Minds–Using Soft Power to Undermine Terrorist Networks (Washington Quarterly Readers) (Paperback)

Review: World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series) (Hardcover)