This book has now passed into Open Access, but I continue to believe that Amazon should consider offering it as a CreateSpace and Kindle option. Dissent is a patriotic duty. The Iraq War was elective and based on 935 now-documented lies. What is done in our name today with drones and assassination teams and incarceration without due process is unConstitutional in the USA and a crime against humanity abroad. I am a patriot. A patriot does not let traitors get away with hijacking the government and must at a minimum speak their mind.
I entitled this review with the sub-title of Elizabeth Janeway's brilliant book. This is a book that is long overdue for a reprint and perhaps an update. I read it in the 1980's and used it in the 1990's on more than one occasion, with the line, inspired by this book:
“It used to be legal to oppress people of color and women–that did not make it right.”
The author, and the book, are central to any literature or discussion of the role of dissent in society, and the manner in which the public can ultimately triumph over any external authority including dictatorships and abusive corrupt regimes.
5.0 out of 5 stars Stellar Offering — Both Panoramic and Specific, February 23, 2013
First let me warn other reviewers, the new Amazon review protocol is not friendly. You have to enter a short review first, and then once that goes live, you can write a more sophisticated review with product links. I will come back and delete this once Amazon gets its act together, product links being one of the most important capabilities it offers reviewers.
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Mel Goodman is one of a handful of scholar-practitioners writing about intelligence that actually knows what he is talking about, in detail down to the individual personality level. His earlier book Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA has been highly recommended by Retired Reader whom I consider an alter ego in terms of substance. I myself have reviewed here at Amazon over 300 books on the craft of intelligence, and almost all of those reviews, each leading back to their Amazon page, can be found by searching for the following phrase: Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most).
What the author has done with this book is provide a coherent panoramic view of the politicization and militarization of intelligence (two forms of deep corruption) over the course of multiple administrations. As Retired Reader points out in his review of Goodman's earlier book, he names names and that is one of the book's features.
The core message of the book in my view is that Presidents have become hostage to the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional complex, and this is due in part to the fact that most of the people they pick for key jobs are themselves poorly read and intellectually challenged — they don't have a strategic perspective and are ineffective at challenging lies and misrepresentation from the Pentagon and its allies.
Early on I note the author's characterization of Hillary Clinton as a strategic “zero” who went along with criminally insane perpetuation of the Cheney regime's neo-conservative and extra-judicial approach to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). I have to agree with the author, and also observe that in my experience too many at the Pentagon are incapable of thinking with both intelligence and integrity at the same time. Throughout the book the author documents the incompetence of presidential advisers (so-called National Security Advisor Tom Donilon jumps to mind as the current poster boy) as well as flag officers and senior executives at the Pentagon in relation to strategic thinking — that is to say, as Sam Nunn would put it, coherent holistic thinking that connects means, ways, and ends. See also Ralph Peters' Lines of Fire: A Renegade Writes on Strategy, Intelligence, and Security [ LINES OF FIRE: A RENEGADE WRITES ON STRATEGY, INTELLIGENCE, AND SECURITY BY Peters, Ralph ( Author ) Sep-19-2011
I find the author's early discussion of covert action as a form of militarization, and his review of how this was viewed as a means of permitting reductions in defense spending in the years after Eisenhower, quite useful. He is starkly critical of the appointments of Jim Clapper as DNI and David Petraeus as Director of CIA, both representing the militarization of intelligence. Jim Clapper used to be one of my heroes and then he lost his mind and disappeared down the rabbit hole of dishonest corporate vapor-ware and “keep the money moving.” Patraeus was a political fraud — a different version of Bob Gates, skilled at political accommodation and public mis-representation of his accomplishments, and CIA was a victim of the President's need to sideline Petraeus in the run up to the 2012 election.
The author id deeply critical of Bill Clinton's choices for CIA director — Woolsey, Deutch, and Tenet — and I have to agree. The author suggests that each of them contributed to the final decline and fall of the CIA, and I have to agree. George Tenet in particular not only dismissed all of the recommendations of the Aspin-Brown Commission and the superb report that Boyd Sutton did on “The Challenge of Global Coverage” (calling for $1.5B tallied as $10M a year for each of 150 targets or topics not now covered by the secret world); but he also mis-represented CIA and prostituted himself to give a well-intentioned president a “slam dunk” endorsement of a mendacious Vice President's 935 now-documented lies justifying a war on Iraq.
The author connects the criminalization of the White House from the Reagan era to the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama eras, and one quote captures my imagination:
QUOTE (99): The pardon for Weinberger was particularly damaging because his contemporaneous notes documented “a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
As I go more deeply into the book I am occasionally disconcerted by clear gaps in the author's understanding, no doubt because his reading and focus has been narrower than mine. He accepts as a given that the Department of State did not prepare for post-war Iraq, and he completely overlooks the tenure of General Jay Garner, who in a civilian capacity was ready to get us out of Iraq after 90 days. In fact, documented across multiple books, not only did the Department of State do an extraordinary job of preparing for post-war Iraq, they were banned from Iraq for the first year of occupation, and Dick Cheney replaced Garner with Bremer to destroy the early-out option. I cannot over-state the evil done by the nakedly amoral Dick Cheney who committed treason, in my view, on multiple occasions and in direct violation of the good intentions of the dolt that was his ostensible superior, President George Bush. Over 20 impeachable offenses by Cheney are itemized in the book and my review of the book Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.
The author gives Donald Rumsfeld high marks the second time around as Secretary of Defense for making some key decisions on logistics interoperability among allies and on having big ideas for reform, and I am more than willing to accept his judgment and temper my own dismay over Rumsfeld — as with Gates and Powell — confusing loyalty with integrity and betraying the public trust by helping Dick Cheney get away with the subversion of the Constitution (good-bye Article 1) and the destruction of the Republic's economy through imperial over-reach at public expense.
QUOTE (151): The use of tailored intelligence to justify an immoral war was a direct result of the Bush administration's militarizing of the intelligence community.
The author goes on to cite the Silberman-Robb Commission finding that because of the militarization of intelligence, there was no focus on the strategic issues surrounding the elective war on Iraq and the consequences of eliminating the primary bulwark against Iran. I have reviewed 49 books tagged “Iraq” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, with each review leading back to their Amazon page. The author has missed a great deal of detail, but his narrative is coherent and righteous.
Chapter Six is the heart of the book and provides a useful chapter for assigned reading if only one chapter can be chosen. The militarization of intelligence led to a cooking of the books reminscent of Viet-Nam. I personally believe that had a series of CIA directors had greater personal integrity, this would not have been the case, but when one combines political appointees without integrity and a Pentagon without integrity, one gets a cesspool of unanticipated and unintended consequences. Two quotes:
QUOTE (231): In fact, one of President Obama's greatest failures in dealing with national security issues has been his failure to address the moral issues he inherited from the Bush administration, particularly the CIA's use of torture and abuse ….. drone warfare; assassinations and extra-judicial killings ….
Here I find the author naive. Obama-Biden are a continuation of Bush-Cheney, and one has only to look at the Attorney General and his wildly promiscuous destruction of most of the Articles in the Bill of Right, capped off by his telling the Court in writing that the Department of Justice has the right to lie to the courts in cases of national security. John Brannan is a good man out of his depth in matters of state, but the culture of the Obama White House, with Tom Donilon and John Brennan being the Monica Lewinsky and Ollie North of our time, is unabashedly imperial, immoral, and incompetent.
QUOTE (270): The CIA has become the most militarized civilian intelligence organization in Washington…
The author is completely correct here, the emphasis being on civilian — the military has always owned the imagery and signals intelligence agencies, and Dick Cheney and Bob Gates, among others, have been the primary opponents of intelligence reform in favor of keeping secret intelligence dollars under military control, and secret intelligence products skewed toward inflated threats and often imaginary threats.
The end of the book is for me the rich experience — the author is uniquely qualified for having spend 14 years at the National Defense University on top of 24 years at CIA — and he offers up very specific recommendations for cutting back the US military at a time when the incoming Secretary of Defense, probably Chuck Hagel, desperately needs a handful of people with both intelligence and integrity.
Chapter Seven is devoted to a careful articulation of the lies and other forms of professional malfeasance surrounding the Pentagon's waste of tens of billions of dollars annually on missile defense. In two words: “cut here.”
Among his other recommendations:
01 Reduce the size of the standing uniformed force and the civilian workforce by 20% (I would strive for 30% while protecting the National Guard and making the Guard releasable for war only with the advice and consent of each state's legislature).
02 Return the 300,000 military personnel serving overseas outside of Afghanistan and Iraq (and of course terminate our presence there as well as the presence of the Joint Special Operations Group (JSOG) and Special Operations Forces (SOF), two different beasts, in over 100 countries.
03 Radically reduce the number of officers (rank structure) across all of the services. Personally I believe a good start would be ordering all four star and three star general home, and then retiring all of them at their reduced earned rank. The USA has the most bloated officer corps in the world — in history — and nothing would help the incoming Secretary of Defense clean the stables faster, than the retirement of the unethical clowns that have overseen the post-Cold War porkfest.
04 Extend the retirement age of military personnel who do NOT go into combat (I would offset this with a radical increase in military mental and physical health capabilities, and use the VA hospital system as a a scalable model for a national health care system that eliminates the 50% of health dollars that are documented waste (see the excellent report, “The Price of Excess” by PriceWaterhouseCoopers).
05 Rapidly eliminate Cold War systems that do not work and are not affordable nor sustainable. Every service has its dogs. The fact is that the Joint Requirements System is dishonest, incoherent, and a complete betrayal of the public trust. Among the dogs are the Marine Corps V-22, the Army Future Combat System (FCS), every Air Force aircraft program, most Navy ship and seaborne weapons system programs; and the entirety of the DoD communications and computing system.
06 Radically reduce the nuclear arsenal.
07 Radically reduce military assistance to the 40 dictators that we favor. See Ambassador Mark Palmer's Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. I favor transferring half of these funds to the Department of State to wage peace and stabilizations and reconstruction operations, but on condition that the Department of State learn how to leave the capital city and get its hands dirty — the Agency for International Development (AID) has been retarded by its integration into State, the time has come to rethink the entire global engagement infrastructure, and it may be that some form of inter-agency foreign service including Commerce is needed, especially well qualified people whose signal virtue is that they never ever go inside an Embassy.
08 Document for the public, with precision, the Congressional pork attendant to every defense program. 5% is the standard kick-back on the Hill. While I believe that defense reform can be job and revenue neutral district by district and state by state, I also believe we need to stop throwing things together so corruptly, and radically alter how we buy or build. In my view, the DoD Inspector General is toothless and — a few superb investigations not-with-standing — comatose. Certainly in my own domain, intelligence, I consider the DoD IG to be a chimera.
09 The author is kinder to the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) than I would be. I agree that DARPA has much to be proud of, but like military assistance to dictators, the time has come for DARPA to shift half its budget to programs relevant to waging peace by preventing war. One area I would like to see, a dual-use area, is that of an Autonomous Internet and a serious Pentagon embrace of Open Source Everything (OSE), the only scalable means of getting to Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-making (M4IS2), itself the foundation for hybrid public governance and what I have called for two decades, “information peacekeeping.”
There are a number of areas that could have reinforced the author's argument if addressed, including the dual chain of command that needs to be ruthlessly destroyed, the role of the financial interests, the still extant matter of $2.3 trillion never accounted for (Rumsfeld was being grilled by Congress about this on 9/10), the emerging scandal of vast underground cities built by a mix of Pentagon and private sector “deep secrecy” networks (see for instance Underground Bases and Tunnels: What Is the Government Trying to Hide?, and the continuing outrage of not having a credible Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E) capability that is both honest and holistic. Were the Pentagon capable of intelligence with integrity, which it is not — neither the Defense Intelligence Agency nor the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence meet my minimalist standards — the Stryker would never have been contracted for (too heavy, has to be broken down into TWO air lifts segments), nor would the 197 artillery system ever gotten past the laughing stage.
I have ordered a companion to this book, Daniel Wirls, Irrational Security and will review that next week-end. This book does not address the other half of our criminally insane national security complex, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), both of which appear to be working against the public interest most of the time. See for example, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security and any of the other nine books that include “Homeland Insecurity” in their title. On the FBI, see the recently released The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism.
This book, and others like it, could not have come at a better time, but I have no expectations that Chuck Hagel will get it right — he is more likely to be an inffective repeat of William Cohen, and not a William Perry, mostly because he does not know what he does not know, and he does not understand how vital it is that he first fix intelligence support to strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations, demanding ethical evidence-based decision support for truly joint evaluations of force structure and force posture. I pray he gets it right — like my prayers for the restoration of America the Beautiful and the Constitution, I am not holding my breath waiting for results.
Below are my final two allowed links, and the titles (search for) of my defense reviews pertinent to appreciating this book by Mel Goodman.
Prosecutions of *actual* terrorists in America since 9/11/01 can be counted on one hand (Moussoui, Zazi, Shazad, Abdulmuttalab). All of the rest are bogus, with at least 50 being straight-up entrapment jobs by the FBI and their handsomely paid (by you) informants.
The next time some real terrorists plot to blow something up in America, the FBI will no doubt miss it, being too busy tricking the slowest kid down at the Islamic bookstore into praising Osama for the promise of $20,000.
5.0 out of 5 stars We NEED Deep History to Counter-Act Criminal Insanity Within Our Elite, February 17, 2013
This book could not have come out at a better time, as the neo-conservatives continue to try to inspire confrontation with Iran, using the same methods that Dick Cheney used — in his case 935 now documented lies — to invade Iraq.
I was drawn to this book by Leon Hadar's review (he is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East in Reason.com, “Our Man in Iran: How the CIA and MI6 installed the Shad.” I am a former CIA clandestine case officer, and today an arch-critic of expensive ignorant secret sources and methods, while also being a champion for open source everything and multinational information-sharing and sense-making — the anti-thesis of all that CIA represents.
Please do look up the Hadar review online, he writes from a geopolitical perspective. As an intelligence professional myself, and as someone who cares deeply about achieving intelligence with integrity in the public interest, my own comments focus on how vital this book is as a means of exposing information pathologies — below are a few books about such pathologies, all of which are illiminated by this book on UK-US perfidy and CIA “success” that is actually an ignominious denial of history, reality, and morality.
We are at a turning point in modern human history — the Earth will survive us, but if we are to survive and prosper, we must confront the stark reality that with a few exceptions (Iceland, Nordics, BENELUX) all Western governments are corrupt to the bone. In the USA, the two-party tyranny whores itself to Wall Street, and there is no difference between the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Cheney Regime (Bush Senior led the CIA team that assassinated JFK, see for example Dark Legacy, Bush Junior was nothing more than a well-intentioned idiot whose Dad and assorted criminal allies bought him the Presidency (and Al Gore's playing dead)) and the Obama Regime with its drones and special forces teams doing extrajudicial killings all over the world, and the Department of Justice making torture and rendition and execution of US citizens “OK” while telling the Court they have a right to lie to the Court in case of national security. America gone mad, indeed.
5.0 out of 5 stars An instant classic, could inspire a series, December 26, 2012
I like this book very much, to the point of tempering my recurring criticisms (the author touches ever so lightly on reality that analysts are toads without decent all-source collection, 21st century processing power, and ethical interested customers for their hard-won insights).
Use Inside the Book if you have any doubts. I am particularly inspired by the pricing of this book, one of the most affordable volumes in the discipline, and one that every professional should own and every student should be required to reflect upon.
At my level of appreciation the footnotes and the bibliography are often the most interesting, and in the case of this book, I looked carefully at the sources recommended, and below list ten books that complement this one, that are NOT listed by the author.
5.0 out of 5 stars Important Milestone, Two Gaps, February 4, 2013
I was educated in the Limits to Growth period–back in the day of telephone couplers–and have also been an ardent follower of Herman Daly's pioneering work in ecological economics as well as complementary work spanning the last several decades, notably by Paul Hawkins among others.
On the one hand this book is very important and not to be ignored, not least because the foreword is written by Herman Daly and there are pages of glowing endorsement from serious people. The book is superbly organized and below I do my summary, as much for my own future recall as for others. First however, two gaps:
01 This book shares one troubling assumption with Limits to Growth — they thought they could micro-manage from the top down and that governments would be the principal actors. The Club of Rome, in choosing to support the Meadows and Randers, explicitly rejected the more affordable and implementable alternative that focused on educating the public with respect to true costs and creating a culture of bottom up conservation instead of a bureaucracy of top-down regulation.
02 The book is perfection incarnate with respect to being the best summary I have seen yet of what are we doing now and what should we be doing, but it skips over the hard part: how to we establish a universal appreciation for whole systems thinking, respect for feedback loops, and acute public awareness of the true cost of every product, service, and behavior? The concept of a steady-state economy is a useful one, but only if one appreciates, as Charles Perrow is at pains to document, that we are our own worst enemies, creating catastrophe at every turn, because we know not what we do or what is done in our name, and allow the hoarding of profit and the externalization of costs to future generations.
Implicit in both of the above, and explicitly not addressed in the book, is the reality that all organizations — be they government or private sector and including non-profit — are corrupt to the bone. Their leaders are focused on what benefits the leaders, not the ctizens, tax-payers, stake-holders, etcetera. I certainly agree with Lawrence Lessig that “the” fatal threat to humanity is CORRUPTION, and I have set for myself the task of further PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST.
I particularly reject the carbon tax, mercury and sulfer are much more dangerous, and the last thing we need is another derivatives scheme. Please note that my praise for the book is denoted by the five star ranking and my strong recommendation that it be bought, read, and shared. By virtue of my need to also focus on what is not in the book, my critical comments may seem inconsistent with the grade but they are not — they augment this excellent work rather than diminish it.
Now to the details.
High-level objectives:
+ New measures and meanings of progress
+ Limits on material and energy consumption, waste production, plus conservation of natural lands
+ A staple population and labor force
+ A more efficient capital stock
+ More durable, repairable products
+ Better pricing including a carbon tax [NO — just make TRUE COST pricing available at point of sale]
+ Shorter work week and more leisure time
+ Reduced inequality
+ Fewer status goods
+ More informative and less deceptive advertising [NO — END all advertising]
+ Better screening of technology [NO — UNLEASH all technologies now locked up for the wrong reasons]
+ More local and less global trade of goods and services [YES — resilience at the local level]
+ Education for life, not just for work [YES, free for life as well]
The authors then go on to discuss eleven things we have too much of, and how to reduce them:
01 Throughput [use only what will renew, create no waste that will not recycle]
02 People [educate the women, make population limitation a national cultural priority]
03 Inequality [set maximum pay differentials, employee owned companies]
04 Debt [end national debt, local currencies, restructure financial institutions]
05 Miscalculation [Human Well-Being as Measure]
06 Unemployment [Full employment policies]
07 Business as Usual [Limit size of corporations]
08 Materialism [Eliminate planned obsolescence, culture of humanity instead of things]
09 Silence [Strengthen academic multi-disciplinary steady-state voice]
10 Unilateralism [Stop being the bully — multinational consensus]
11 Waiting [sustainable scale, fair distribution, efficient allocation, high quality of life]
There are many excellent notes but no bibliography, and the index is a bit light.
The authors take a stab at a “whole system” conclusion, with the following each discussed in a paragraph:
01 Consumption
02 Population
03 Families
04 Community
05 Business
06 Cities
07 Agriculture
08 Nature
09 Energy
10 Money
This is where I identify a third gap in the book. The concept of “free energy” is not in this book, and it should be. Apart from exposing and eradicating corruption in all its forms — in the USA it is corruption, nothing more, that causes the US Government to borrow one trillion dollars a year and waste 50% of three trillion dollars a year each year — we should be doing a global Manhattan Project to create free energy, which in turn creates unlimited clean water. Throw in national call centers, an Autonomous Internet with Freedom Towers everywhere and free cell phones for life for the five billion poor, and you create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all.
Governments have failed and are not the answer. There are eight “tribes” of knowledge: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit. We are at the very beginning of an era of hybrid governance that must be enabled by open-source decision-support. That is the center of gravity for creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, and that is not something the ecological economists have grasped just yet.
5.0 out of 5 stars ABSORBING — An Essential Reading for Citizens and Soliders, February 4, 2013
I did a very detailed review of the author's first book, In the Hot Zone and I recommend that book as well as this one. They are different books and complement one another. The first book is about the over-all external reality of war, this book is about the internal reality and loss of reality and inner psychic confusion, grief, pain and general loss of self that war inflicts on those that survive it.
The book can be read in a morning, and in my view is an excellent gift for young men thinking about joining the military. It is also an excellent reference and could usefully be required reading in both entry level and mid-career courses for Staff Non-Commissioned Officers (SNCO), Chief Warrant Officers (CWO), and officers including officers at Command & Staff College or a War College. Certainly it would be a very valuable reference for those who are going into a combat zone as civilians, including United Nations, Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, and others. In all my reading, I have no encountered a book quite like this, focused on putting together direct first person stories covering the following topics as ably captioned by the author:
Part I: The Killing Business: What's It Like to Kill in War?
Part II: The Wounds of War: What's It Like to be Shot, Bombed, or Burned in Combat?
