3 Star – Page 14 – Public Intelligence Blog

A real loser of a book, TIRED, not even close to being progressive,

March 15, 2006

Matthew Kerbel

This book was a huge disappointment. A real loser of a book, very TIRED. I doubt that Howard Dean even read this loose collection of short articles by different people, before he agreed to lend his name to it.

There is no real discussion of any issue in this loosely edited work, most of the focus is on sub-elements of the democratic constituency and abouit “the message.”

Even worse, for anyone actually familiar with progressives and the new progressives, it is infuriating to not see any mention of Paul Ray and the Cultural Creatives, and the New Political Compass (Google it to get a grip). These people don't even mention the New America Foundation and that brilliant book on “The Radical Center.”

LOSERS! This is why the Democratic Party is not a credible alternative to liars with money to burn.

2006/01/112009/12/04

Review: Disinformation –22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror (Hardcover)

3 Star, Information Society, Misinformation & Propaganda

One third correct, one third misleading, one third nonsense,

January 11, 2006

Richard Miniter

This book caught my eye in an airport bookstore, and I certainly do recommend it for purchase and review if you can afford it (see last line), but with a ton of salt. It could be usefully read with Larry Beinhart's “Fog Facts,” Robert Parry's “Lost History,” and Roger Shattucks's “Forbidden Knowledge.” Taken together, the four books provide a superb overview of what can be known, ignored, lost, hidden, or manipulated.

One third of these myths are correct and acceptable. For example, the myth that Bin Laden was funded by CIA (he was not, he was funded by the Saudi government), and the myth that Bin Laden is extraordinarily wealthy (he is not, he gets up to $10M a year from varied sources including $1M from his family in Saudi Arabia) are both well known to those who read widely in this area.

One third of these myths are misleading and incomplete. For example, the myth that Bin Laden was not heard of suggests that he came out in 1998 when he actually came out, with the full support of the Saudi government, in 1988. The author appears unwitting of the book by Yossef Bodansky on “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on the US” and varied interviews in the pre-1998 era when Bin Laden said, on the record and on camera, that he planned to attack America if it did not remove its military forces from the Middle East. The myth on the 6 August CIA briefing to the President is *very* misleading, and ignores the enormous additional information that was provided.

Some of the myths are pure nonsense. The three that stand out are the author's attempt to show that Iraq had a great deal to do with Al Qaeda; that Al Qaeda does not have nuclear devices; and that Halliburton has not really profited from Iraq. The author is disingenuous at best. All of the Arabic literature clearly shows that Bin Laden despised Saddam Hussein and had no need nor desire for his support, incidental encounters not-withstanding (the President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, has repeatedly stated that the myth of a meeting in Prague is just that–a myth). Paul Williams has done a fine job of bringing together all the open source information on Al Qaeda having both nuclear devices, and access to Pakistani and Russian and Iranian expertise in “refreshing” those devices (see my review of “Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9-11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You”). Finally, on Halliburton (which includes the Brown and Root company that many say smuggles drugs back into the US with CIA complicity), the author is actively either ignorant or dishonest. Halliburton cooks its books, plain and simple. They are under active investigation for cheating the military in Iraq, and they paid $15M on billions in profit in one tax year that has been publicly examined.

One quarter of the book is appendices of dubious value.

Bottom line: if you make more than $75K a year and like to be informed, buy the book. If you make less, do not bother, get a good steak instead.

2006/01/082009/12/04

Review: The Powers of War and Peace–The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Hardcover)

3 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Useful in Understanding the Arrogance and Ignorance of Presidential Sychophants,

January 8, 2006

John Yoo

EDITED 17 Oct 07 to add links to ten relevant books.

There is absolutely no question but that the author of this book is patriotic, educated (after the American fashion), and well-intentioned. Sadly, this does not mean that he has any common sense, any historical context, any strategic vision, nor any relevance to the future. Indeed, and I rarely write negative reviews (5 out of 1015+), this book is most useful for understanding the ignorance and arrogance of Presidential sycophants who place loyalty to a single man and office and party (or rather, ideological branch of the party) above their loyalty to the Constitution, the Republic, or the public interests they are supposed to be defending.

The book is best summarized by a quote from a White House staffer who is reported to have said, in talking to an expert on foreign affairs, “You must be one of those reality-based people. We are an empire, we make our own reality.”

The problem with this arrogant and ignorant statement, which is manifested throughout this interesting book, is that a reality based on ideological fantasy and the security of hiding behind the Secret Service completely begs off on confronting the harsh realities of a world in which 5 billion pissed off poor people are inevitably going to sponsor 1 million armed terrorists who know how to create Improvised Explosive Devises (IED) and know how to deliver the “death of a thousand cuts” to US infrastructure (water and fuel pipelines, energy generators, shipping port cranes, key communications switching stations, key banks, etc.

The “sucking chest wound” in this book is that it does not recognize the role played by the (once) wise men of Congress, in two houses–one, the Senate, designed for long-term deliberation, the other, the House, designed for mid-term respect for the “wisdom of the crowds,” both of which were created by the Founders to temper Presidential hubris, Presidential ambition, and Presidential mendacity.

The fact that our Congress today is grotesquely corrupt and dysfunctional does not in any way render the above point moot. As we saw in the rush to war on Iraq, which has now put us in a six-front-war that will last 100 years, the Executive is all too fragile and malleable and prone to short-term error with long-term consequences.

The author makes a case for Presidential power in this book that is isolated from historical, ideo-cultural, socio-economic, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic context. This is not a debate about how to get from here to 2008 “efficiently,” but rather a debate about how to survive and prosper as a Nation over the next 200 to 500 years.

Were the author more intellectually-honest and reality-aware, he would understand that the future of American cannot be secured by a few guns against 5 billion at the “Bottom of the Pyramid,” and he would understand that the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, the rise of pandemic disease, the looming catastrophes of poverty and environmental degradation are all context within which long-term strategies are essential, in which we must help create indigenous wealth that is scalable and self-generating.

Bottom line: this book represents the kind of narrow, ignorant, sycophantic view of the Presidency that has come to characterize the Cheney-Addington-Gonzalez view of Bush as a puppet and the people as stupid. If this book were to become “reality,” not only would Congress and the people forfeit all their powers (of the purse, of the power to declare war, of the power to hold elections, of the power to live under the rule of law), but in becoming “reality,” this book's premises would destroy the Republic.

Read this to understand the internal threat to our Republic. Well-intentioned individuals who have no clue how to serve the people, and are intent on serving their narrow constituency of a single President whose wealthy pals want to loot the Commonwealth with as few restrictions as possible until the party is over and they can move to Switzerland and leave us to deal with their multiple deficits.

I have three sons. This book has persuaded me that they must each receive a liberal arts education before going on to specialize in a craft, for in this book, I see all that is evil about narrowly-educated individuals who mean well but know little of the real world.

2005/11/062009/12/04

Review DVD War of the Worlds

3 Star, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Reviews (DVD Only), War & Face of Battle

Gripping for Children, Annoying for Adults,

November 6, 2005

Tom Cruise

My ten-year old loved this movie and found it gripping. I found it annoying. A pale green overcast to the film, a general sense of staleness. The plot was so poorly developed that what really stood out in the first half of the movie was how stupid kids can be, not listening to adults when danger is present, and blowing it with childish screams at exactly the wrong moment. Perhaps this is Hollywood “fast food” and intended to be dramatic.

This comment may strike many as off-topic, but if you glance over my other 600 reviews (almost all of non-fiction about global issues), you might see the logic. Toward the end of the movie, with a bow toward Huntingon's “Clash of Civilization,” I saw the “aliens” as the U.S. and the humans as “everyone else.” The aliens crashed through, sucked blood (oil), destroyed everything in their path. In the end, they were undone by a suicidal terrorist (Tom Cruise) who was willing to go into the bowels of the beast to explode grenades, but was saved by a uniformed pal so we could have a happy ending.

I do not know if H.G. Well intended this (his book, “The World Brain” is one of the most important books anyone could ready right now as we prepare to create that World Brain and empower people), but all the reading I am doing is putting forward multiple world wars: between humans and bacteria; between individuals and corporations; between reality-based policy and zealot faith-based policy; between radicalized Islam and radicalized Judiaism that has merged with extremist evangelical Christianity.

At the end, I gave the movie four stars instead of three because it did cause me to think and reflect on the modern implications of man versus machine.

2005/09/182009/12/04

Review: Presence–An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (Hardcover)

3 Star, Future

Smart, Self-Absorbed Taped Conversation Unlinked to Work of Others,

September 18, 2005

Peter M. Senge

This is a fairly annoying book if you are at all well-read, and especially so if you read Charles Hampden-Turner's Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. in the 1970's and are familiar with a sampling of Eastern “connectedness” thought as well as the range of human and global problems and solutions literature running from the Club of Rome to the econological economics of Herman Daly to the integrative science and humanities of E.O. Wilson and Margaret Wheatley to the World Bank and United Nations global studies.

The book is especially annoying because it is so self-absorbed and undisciplined in its presentation. Essentially, four smart people, each a world-class performer in their narrow domain (and familiar with the standard range of knowledge management and futures forecasting literature), but not at all well-read across either the spiritual or the ecological and game of nations literature, cooked up a plan for tape-recording their conversations and turning it into a book

The book is double-spaced throughout, and its obliviousness to the larger body of literature created in me, as I moved from chapter to chapter looking for gems, a growing sense of impatience and annoyance.

The “U” is a cute idea if you have not heard of self-awareness, collective intelligence, synergy (an over-used word, but one that existed with meaning long before this book or the “U”), or informal “think globally, act locally” that the Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were pioneering long before these authors decided it would be cool to fund their reflections among themselves.

Don't waste your time or money. Instead, buy Charles Hampden Turner's Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. Robert Buckman's Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and any of Margaret Wheatley's books. This book is a very weak and rather poorly executed second-hand rendition of the thoughts of others, both those the authors' have been exposed to, and the many others the authors have not bothered to read into.

There is one serious thought in this book that bears quotation. It is on page 216. “At the heart of the challenge facing HP–and lots of other businesses–is the way information moves around the world. In order to grow in line with our business, new ways of experiencing information will be needed. When Humberto says that ‘love is the only emotion that expands intelligence,' it reminds us that legitimacy and trust are crucial for the free flow of information and for how information gets transformed into value.” Perhaps I expect too much, but the fact that the authors fail to cite the Nobel Prize awarded for the proof that trust lowers the cost of doing business, and they have no awareness of key works on legitimacy as the foundation for global stability, such as the edited work by Max Manwaring on The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century simply confirmed my sense that this book is “disconnected” from a larger body of thought.

Reading this book was like being forced to sit next to four active cell-phone users for three hours in a cramped space. Not fun at all.

2005/07/012009/12/04

Review DVD: Cracking the Code to the Extraordinary

3 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Reviews (DVD Only)

Forget this one, get “What in the Bleep”,

July 1, 2005

Ramtha

In comparison with “What the Bleep Do We Know” which I rate at five stars, this is a relatively light-weight and somewhat flakey sideshow. Don't waste your time. I will note that the same blond is in both DVD's–in this one she is a quasi-cult feel good about yourself old hippie, in the better DVD she comes across as a serious person with an important message.

Highlight (this DVD generated one note card, the other one 9):

God is us channeling up and out.

Each of us is an “observer.”

There are multiple worlds, we can transfer between past and future.

Time & space are NOT a continuum.

If you pay attention, you ARE “God.”

*You* create your life, you decide what external “opinions” to act on.

On balance, not worth the time–but I really want to stress this, this woman's contributions in the better DVD that I do recommend, clearly mark her as a serious person worth listening to. This tape is fluff compared to the other one.

What the Bleep Do We Know!?
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

2004/11/112009/12/04

Review: Inside CentCom–The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Iraq, Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, War & Face of Battle

Puff Piece, Bland, Avoids Conflicting Facts & Big Picture,

November 11, 2004

Mike DeLong

On balance I found this book very disappointing. It reads more like “how I spent my summer vacation” (and like all school essays, avoids the negatives), and it also reads as if the author is either oblivious to or unaccepting of the investigative journalism reporting. I use Tora Bora as a litmus test. For this author to fail to mention that Secretary Rumsfeld authorized a Pakistani airlift that ultimately took 3,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters out of the Tora Bora trap, tells me all I need to know about the over-all balance in this account. It is a glossy rose-colored view more suited for Fox viewers than for any military or intelligence professional who is actually well-read across global issues literature. A great deal of important detail is left out of this 140-page double-spaced book (the additional 80 pages are largely useless appendices used to bulk up the book).

In no way does this diminish the personal accomplishments of the author. He was clearly a great general and a loyal hard-working individual within the military chain of command. The book does however trouble me in that it has a very tight narrow focus on military operations “as ordered,” and does not reflect the kind of geo-political awareness and nuanced appreciation of non-military factors–diplomatic, cultural, economic, demographic–that I want to see at the flag level. His treatment of Sudan in passing is representative: astonished delight that they are “helping” in the war on terrorism, and no sense at all of the massive genocide of the Sudanese government against its own people.

On the intelligence aspect, this book smells a bit. The general has not been close enough to CIA to know that agents commit treason, case officers handle them–calling a CIA officer an “agent” is a sure sign of ignorance about what CIA does and how it does it. He also claims, contrary to many open source reports as well as government investigations, that Guantanamo produced “reams of intelligence.” In my own experience, tactical combatants have very little to offer in the way of strategic third-country intelligence leads, and on balance, I believe that while the general may have been led to believe that Guantanamo was a gold mine, in fact it was a tar pit and a blemish on the US Armed Forces. The author continues to be a believer in the now long-discredited Chalabi-DIA-CIA views on the presence of weapons of mass destruction, to the point of still being in the past on the issue of the aluminum tubes.

There are exactly two gems in this book. The first deals with the problems we had in supporting our Special Forces in Afghanistan above the 12,000 foot level (actually, anything above 6,000 feet challenges our aviation). I ask myself in the margin, “why on earth don't we have at least one squadron of helicopters optimized for high-altitude combat operations?” The Special Air Force may claim they do, but I don't believe it. We need a high-altitude unit capable of sustained long-haul operations at the 12,000 foot level, not just a few modified Chinooks and brave Chief Warrant Officers that “made do.”

The second gem in the book is a recounted discussion on the concept of Arab honor and how US troops in Iraq should have a special liaison unit that approached the families of each person killed “inadvertently” to offer a profound and sincere apology and an “accidental killing fee.” This resonates with me, and I was disappointed to see no further discussion–evidently the general heard and remembered this good idea, but did nothing to implement it.

I have ordered a copy of the Koran and will read it, because I respect this officer's account of how much good it did him in understanding his mission and the context for the mission (aided by a regular discussion of the contents with an Islamic practitioner).

Bottom line: great officer within his scope, moderate author within his mandate, the book is at about 60% of where I would expect to be given this officer's extraordinary access.

Category: 3 Star

Review: Get This Party Started–How Progressives Can Fight Back and Win (Paperback)