1-7 Star Rating – Page 280 – Public Intelligence Blog

2003/11/082009/12/04

Review: Lost History–Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’

4 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Misinformation & Propaganda

Corruption & Mendacity of White House, CIA Failures in Central America,

November 8, 2003

Robert Parry

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

This book is a real gem. It outlines a tale of both corruption and ideological mendacity within the White House, and of ignorance and unprofessionalism with the Directorate of Operations in the Central Intelligence Agency. As one who served on the Central American Task Force at the time, and as a clandestine case officer focused on these matters, I find it especially fascinating that I, from the inside, was truly unaware of the degree to which we were engaged in direct support to a band of contras characterized by drug-running, money-laundering, corruption, rape, torture, routine murders, and perhaps worse of all, total incompetence and ineffectiveness.

There are two aspects of this book that truly stand out for anyone who is committed, as I and most CIA employees are, to the concept that “the truth shall make you free.”

First, as the title suggests, there is a “lost history” that is unavailable to the American people. The author is not alone in making this charge. The editors of the history of the Department of State have on several occasions complained, both publicly and privately, that an accurate history of the foreign relations of the United States of America cannot be written without more complete disclosure of our various covert operations. Indeed, Derek Leebaert's book The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World, Jim Bamford's book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, and Sterling and Peggy Sterling's book Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, among a number of others books but these three reviewed by me on Amazon and being the most recent and best documentary efforts, all show that America has paid a *huge* cost, a cost running to trillions of dollars in deceitfully mis-spent dollars and lives, for clandestine and covert activities that have inspired enmity, often nurtured environments of genocide and war crimes (Sudan today, for example, given a “bye” for its nominal counter-terrorism support), and spawned vast war profiteering enterprises at the same time that we nurture and encourage dictatorships such as those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which are protecting Bin Laden, his family (which we allowed to escape from the US rather than taking them hostage–a White House accommodation to its Saudi paymasters), and other terrorists. America needs to understand the truth about such matters, and this book helps.

The other major value of this book is its examination of how the White House, first under Reagan and now under Bush junior, and personified in the activities of one Otto Reich (Reich and Rove are exemplar representatives of the neo-Nazi and neo-conservative aspects of the Cheney-Bush regime), has violated various US laws and values by running psychological operations and media campaigns against its own public. Especially distressing has been the manner in which the National Public Radio (NPR) has been “brought to heel” by threats to cut off its federal subsidies if it fails to accept the lies of the Administration and actually reports truthfully to the public. The Associated Press (AP) is also shown in this book to have subverted the truth and conformed to the falsehoods and propaganda line being purveyed by the Reagan Administration against the American people. The New York Times is specifically cited, on several occasions, and publishing false and misleading information, not because its employees lack ethics (as has recently been the case) but because the NYT is part of the “establishment” and all too eager to betray its readers by publishing the party line from a corrupt White House.

Usefully, the author documents a General Account Office decision on 30 September 1987 that the “white propaganda” of Otto Reich and the Public Diplomacy Office in the Department of State amounted to “prohibited covert propaganda activities” against the US media and the US public. Under Bush Junior the Administration has added blatant lies and manipulated intelligence to its repetoir, and continues to manage covert propaganda against the American people.

Among the most interesting sub-themes the author documents are how Richard Nixon undermined the Vietnam peace talks in order to prevent Johnson from successful resolution, and how Reagan's team undermined the Iran hostage negotiations to prevent Jimmy Carter's ability to resolve that in time for the election. In both cases the Republicans violated the law and engaged in actions that amount to treason–to a betrayal of the public trust. Now fast forward to the recent stories about how Richard Perle was a principal in the Bush Administration's refusal to accept an offer from Saddam Hussein to help in the war on terrorism, allow full US inspection teams, and otherwise give us everything we wanted except his head and the right to loot Iraq. American soldiers are dying today–and a bill we cannot pay is being run up–in Iraq because of Republican treason and Republican lies and Republican propaganda against the American people.

Another important point that this book documents is the sorry reality that CIA analysts cannot trust the CIA clandestine operators to tell them the full truth, and that the US public cannot trust the White House to tell it the full truth (apart from blatant propaganda). The truth in America has been subverted, distorted, and *buried*. As others have documented (see my review of Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq), the American people are, if they are avid searchers for the truth, able to see only 10% of the facts and undistorted information available to Europeans and Asians.

The book has some flaws–a rotten index, some repetition caused by integrating old and new material–but I rank it as essential reading for anyone who would like to understand how we got ourselves into an unjust war with Iraq, how an extremist Republican Administration was able to do Goering proud by manipulating the American Congress and the American people and the United Nations with a “platform of lies.” We have lost history, we have lost ethics, and we are on the verge of losing America and that for which it stands.

2003/10/302009/12/04

Review: The CIA at War–Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror

2 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Not Helpful, Will Mislead Ignorant and Disappoint Pros,

October 30, 2003

Ronald Kessler

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New Comment: terrorism is a tactic, and one cannot make war, or carry out covert actions, against a tactic.

The only thing worse than Bill Gertz making money on a sensationist pseudo-journalism book that does no serious research (i.e. does not read nor recognize any of the tens of books written about the shortfalls of the U.S. Intelligence Community), is re-cycled material and hyped-up glory tales that will mislead the public and irritate professionals. There are many good people working counter-terrorism at CIA, but they are trapped in a grostesquely malformed enterprise with bad management, bad mindsets, and bad methods. As one of the first case officers assigned the terrorist target in the 1980's, I recently came across a letter I wrote to the NIO for terrorism (unclassified), and as I went down all the things I said we were doing wrong in the 1980's, what struck me with great sadness was how many of them are still extant today. While the Director of Central Intelligence may get some satisfaction from sponsoring a silly TV series about a female spy (hint: the most important skill in spying is typing of encounter reports, operational reports, intelligence reports, and expense accounts) and this book, I think his time would be better spent being candid with the American people about all that is wrong with the larger community across all its functions. This book is a borderline “PSYOP” on the American people, something CIA is not supposed to be doing. My bottom line: John Le Carre's fiction is better than this stuff.

Better more current books (the first two very positive):
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: Winning Ugly–Nato’s War to Save Kosovo

4 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Military & Pentagon Power, War & Face of Battle

Important but Incomplete,

October 28, 2003

Ivo H. Daalder

Newt Gingrich is right when he praises this book, and the international reviewers that give it 1-3 stars are also right when they point out that it is seriously incomplete and arguing from a very American point of view.

In my view, this book is essential reading together with the following four books, all of which I have favorably reviewed here at Amazon: first, Kristan Wheaton, The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload, Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Perspectives on Intelligence History), Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, and Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime These four books cover what this book does not: 1) a full explanation of why “inconvenient warning” fails time and again; 2) a full explanation of the complete inadequacy of Western intelligence in relation to historical, cultural, and current indigenous intelligence as well as small arms interdiction in lower-tier unstable regions; 3) a useful itemization of the weaknesses of both NATO and the US military in responding to unconventional challenges in tough terrain distant from the center of Europe; and 4) how “supreme command” is most often exercised without regard to intelligence.

Having said that, let me enumerate what I regard as the very positive features of this book, one that makes it central to the discussion of NATO, Air Power, and US politics as they affect “engagement.”

First, the authors are to be commended for graciously but no less effectively nailing the Clinton Administration, and especially Sandy Berger, Madeline Albright, and William Cohen, for inattention and indecisiveness and a complete lack of any coherent sustainable strategy.

Second, although the author's do not stress this point beyond highlighting it in the opening sentence of the book, it comes across as a continuing theme: the entire conflict could have been resolved early on had the NATO allies had a capability to deal with *one man*, that is, Milosevic.

Third, the authors note clearly (on page 10) how there were many non-violent precursors to the violence and ensued, and that the Albanians finally concluded that only violence would get them international attention. This is a major theme within Jonathan Schell's utterly brilliant and comprehensive book, “The Unconquerable World” and one that any future Director of Central Intelligence must be held accountable for: warning in the *non-violent* stage.

Fourth, the author's, who between them have considerable expertise in defense analysis, indict the Clinton Administration for over-selling the peace negotiation efforts of Ambassador Holbrook, and the very bad campaign planning of General Clark.

Fifth, the author's document the pattern of Madame Secretary Albright, whose own book I recently reviewed along these lines, of rhetoric rather than reality–or words rather than actions with consequences. NATO bluffed while Madeline talked. Milosevic, no fool, understood all this. Albright is, however, credited with understanding that ultimately force would be needed to achieve the policy objectives.

Sixth, and this is something I learned the hard way in El Salvador, the author's very correctly make the point that such conflicts cannot be controlled with pressure on only one of the belligerents. *Both* parties to the conflict must be challenged and contained.

Seventh, the author's are helpful in pointing out that the Administration erred in failing to consider partition and independence as an option for the conflicted parties, and they emphasize that one must never under-estimate the will of any one party to achieve independence.

Eighth, and on the head of the Republicans we place this one, the authors point out that the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton because of his personal relations with Monica Lewinsky severely distracted and handicapped the Administration. Indeed, I recall that in all our Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) reports at the time, we had to modify all of our search strategies to include “and not Monica”, so over-whelming was the trash that would come up on Bosnia and other places we were looking at, all “hits” corrupted unless we excluded the Monica factor from US foreign policy. The lesson we take from this is that impeachment, especially frivolous impeachment, has major national security consequences, and is not merely a matter for domestic consumption or impact assessment.

The book is flawed, but not grievously, for failing to have any serious treatment of intelligence. There are just four over-lapping references to CIA, and to intelligence reports, in the entire book. In as much as this book is up to the norm for beltway policy books, we conclude that until such books have the deeper coverage and understanding of intelligence shortfalls as a matter of routine, intelligence and policy in Washington DC will continue to co-exist without reform and with a deliberate choice being made by policy experts to ignore intelligence and what intelligence, properly done, can bring to the process of peacemaking.

The author's final policy recommendation merit listing, and their elaboration is a highlight of the book:
1) Interventions should occur as early as possible
2) Coercive diplomacy requires a credible threat of force
3) When force is used, military means must relate to political ends
4) Airpower alone usually cannot stop the killing in civil wars
5) The Powell Doctrine for the use of force remains valid
6) Humanitarian interventions need realistic goals
7) Exit strategies are desirable but not always essential
8) Other countries need better, more deployable militaries
9) UN authorization for intervention is highly desirable, even if it is not required
10) Russia's support is valuable in these types of operations
11) NATO works well in peace and in war but only if US leads
12) An effective foreign policy requires that the president lead with confidence.
13) The US is not a hyperpower, but rather a superpower prone to *underachievement* instead of imperial ambition (this was pre-Bush and pre-neocon)

This book stands as the core reference on NATO and Kosovo, and as one of the more helpful references on principles of intervention and foreign policy that all future presidents and their staff can learn from.

Other more recent books I recommend, with reviews:
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
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
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
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

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: Dude, Where’s My Country?

4 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics

Great Detail, Lacks Index,

October 28, 2003

Michael Moore

Although there is some repetition from “Stupid White Men” and there is a clearly a hot publishing trend in pushing out “liberal left outrage” books, the level of detail in this book on specific things that have gone wrong and specific lies and misleading communications from the Bush Administration make this an extraordinary reference work. Michael Moore has done the Democratic's political research for them.Unfortunately, the book suffers from no index. Had the publisher taken one man-week to do a decent index of specific topics and statements that the author has superbly researched and foot-notes, this book could have moved a Nation–as it stands, it will merely incite the already upset.

Do buy the book–the details are wonderful and every American needs to understand the degree to which most public statments and most public reports about the Administration's policies are outright deceptions.

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: Thieves in High Places–They’ve Stolen Our Country–And It’s Time to Take It Back

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics

Very Long Opinion Piece, Part of the Big Picture,

October 28, 2003

Jim Hightower

Although Jim Hightower appears to have been first on the block with satirical and details critiques of the extreme rightists and corporate cronies of the neo-conservatives, it was not until Al Franken and Michael Moore made the genre popular that this book seems to have taken off. It is the equal of Franken's and Moore's books, but lacks any sort of footnotes or bibliography while helpfully including an index for looking up specifics. In combination with the first two books mentioned, and William Greider's earlier and most serious “Who Will Tell the People” as well as his most recent block-buster, “The Soul of Capitalism” (about immoral capitalism and why this leads the rest of the world to fear and hate us), as well as “Weapons of Mass Deception,” this book rounds out a very satisfactory public case for sending the current Administration back to the holes they crawled out of.

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State

6 Star Top 10%, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Public Administration, Secession & Nullification, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

One of a Handful of Revolutionary Books,

October 28, 2003

Philip Allott

Edit of21 Dec 07 to add links and reassert importance of this work.

Of the 1000+ books I have reviewed on Amazon, this is one of a handful that can be considered truly revolutionary. Three others that come instantly to mind are those by Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life.

This book is not an easy read. The author, a Professor of Law in the University of Cambridge, wrote an earlier work, Eunomia: New Order for a New World, that has remained similar obscure, and that is a pity, for what I see here is a truly brilliant mind able to suggest that the Congress of Vienna, the current law of nations, and the de-humanization of state to state relations, isolating the internal affairs and inhumanities of state from global public morality and indignation, are the greatest travesty in human history.

The author joins William Greider in suggesting that the state as a corporate personality is as immoral (and irrational in terms of natural law) as is the corporate personality that allows corporations to treat humans as “goods.” In this book the author sets out to do nothing less than logically overturn centuries of absolutist amoral power institutionalized by elites in the form of state governments with sovereign rights divorced from and with eminent domain over their subjects (vice citizens), and to propose a new form of globalized human society that restores the human aspect to relations among peoples and among nations of peoples.

This is a book that requires patience. It must be slowly and methodically absorbed. The footnotes are quite extraordinary, as is the summative and explicatory survey of many different literatures over many different historical periods.

The author is critical of universities for failing to develop the public mind, and offers a lovely exposition of how sanity, insanity, and public consciousness are all subject to the mythology of capitalism and the manipulation of the elites–in this he would find fellow travelers (smile) in Chomsky and Vidal. He concludes that diplomacy (and statecraft) as an articulation of the public mind and public interest have *failed*, and looks instead to some sort of social re-ordering from the bottom up.

This book, apart from offering an enlightened vision of the law as a living thing able to encapsulate changes morality and changing interests among parties, does nothing less than reconceptualize international relations. This author is to the law of nations what Vaclav Havel was to communism.

He touches on a point Henry Kissinger makes in the last of his books I reviewed (Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century), and specifically that “The risk now facing humanity is the globalizing of the all-powerful, all-consuming social systems, without the moral, legal, political and cultural aspirations and constraints, such as they are, which moderate social action at the national level.” The world, in essence, has become much too complex and much too volatile and much too dangerous for archaic state-level forms of mandarin governance.

In the middle of the book, the author's review of how Germany previously collapsed into a patchwork of insignificant nations sounds all too much like the United States of America, where citizenship is losing its value, tyrannical minorities are in isolation from one another (and from reality), and the sense of national identity is too easily captured by a handful of neo-conservatives (modern Nazis). Interestingly, as with Havel, he notes the importance of art and culture as a means of synthesizing national identity, and would probably agree with E.O. Wilson (“Consilience”) as to the humanities being vital to the context and conduct of the sciences. His list of national “diseases” is both disturbing and timely.

He joins Jefferson and the founding fathers in focusing on the health and happiness of the people as the ultimate organizing principle (some would translate “happiness” as “fulfillment”, a more accomplished and less frivolous objective).

On page 137 he is quite clear in suggesting that capitalism as it is practiced today, is nothing less than a form of totalitarianism, and he goes on to say on page 139 that social evil is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Instead of socializing individuals into the reduced status of “goods” we should be socializing the state into a representative and general democracy by rehumanizing humanity and rehumanizing the organizations that are supposed to provide collective voice to the people.

In following pages the author provides a brilliant catalog of the ills of democracy, reconceptualizes democracy as being based on the rule of law (for all) rather than on who rules (for the benefit of the few), and he explicitly condemns the largely unaccountable forms of concentrated power (by which we take to mean the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other devices for perpetuating immoral capitalism irrespective of local needs).

The full force of the author's thinking comes into full stride in the concluding portions of the book as he integrates new concepts of international law, history, social relations, and new forms of intergovernmental relations truly representative of the species as a whole and the people as a moral force. He laments the manner in which an extraordinarily global elite has been able to “separate” people from morality and from one another, leading to a common acceptance of five intolerable things: 1) unequal social development; 2) war and armaments; 3) governmental oppression; 4) physical degradation; and 5) spiritual degradation.

The author concludes by proposing a new view of the human world, and his remarks must be read in the original. He ends, as do Will and Ariel Durant in their summative “The Lessons of History,” by noting that the necessary revolution is that which must take place in our minds, not on the streets.”

This is an utterly brilliant book that has been badly marketed and is grossly under-appreciated, even by the so-called intelligencia. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to cast off their slave clothes, stop being a drone, and live free.

More recent books that fully validate this superb work, with reviews:
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

2003/10/102009/12/04

Review: Madam Secretary–A Memoir

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Diplomacy

Good, Not Great, Travelogue, not Strategic Dialog,

October 10, 2003

Madeleine Albright

This is a diplomatic companion to Hillary Clinton's lightweight personal story. Madame Secretary will never be confused with Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. It merits comment that Hillary appears to have had a great deal to do with Albright getting the job. If you want a read that covers the years superficially, and glosses over a great deal of what actually did or did not transpire, this is the book for you. If you want serious reading about international relations, or grand strategy, or how to deal with the twenty big problems facing the world, see the other books I have reviewed for Amazon, including Joe Nye, Kissinger, Boren et al, Jonathan Schell, Shultz et al, E.O. Wilson, J. F. Rischard, and so on. Half the book is about the personal path to power, the other half is about very narrow slices of what the Clinton Administration chose to focus on–an administration where foreign policy and national security were largely on automatic pilot and very much in a back seat compared to domestic matters.Most troubling to me is the chapter on terrorism, chapter 22, titled “A Special Kind of Evil.” In exactly 17 pages (.03 of 512 text pages), Albright manages to gloss over the fact that she deliberately and repeatedly sided with Sandy Burger in constantly suppressing intelligence that warned suicidal terrorism was on the rise, and took a back seat–or no seat–on the subject of devising a national grand strategy for counter-terrorism. She is proudest of getting $1 billion for turning our Embassies into bunkers, something 9-11 demonstrated to be inconsequential.

She says “The response by the Clinton administration to the Africa embassy bombings and other attacks on our watch resulted in the apprehension of many terrorist suspects and established a strong precedent for international cooperation in fighting terror.” This is absolute and utter baloney. The reality is that neither the CIA nor the FBI or any foreign governments were actually put on a war footing, because the Clinton's did not want to dim the lights and bear down.

I find it quite noteworthy that “intelligence” does not appear in the index as a term. This is a book about travel and personal meetings, which is how Clinton's national security team spent its time. We have gone from that extreme to the other, of neo-conservatives who never served in uniform throwing military force around unilaterally and indiscriminately.

The next president must find a middle ground, an informed middle ground where intelligence, strategy, policy and spending (“it's not policy until it's in the budget”) are fully integrated, and America is able to devise a sustainable, strong, smart foreign policy that includes a robust homeland defense with homeland counterintelligence, a massive peace force, a considerable global constabulary force, and a big war force sufficient for two major regional conflicts at once. We cannot cut the national security budget by one penny, but by golly, we can do a *lot” better than either the passive Clintonians or the psychopathic Bushies.