Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback – Page 30

Should Be a Four, But Overly Harsh Review Calls for Balance

July 22, 2007

Tim Weiner

While I would normally take away one star for a failure to provide useful policy context (the Presidents and their staffs were as much to blame for all these fiascos, and in his eagerness to do primary research, he appears to have completely missed some very important facts as stated in the varied memoires), on balance this is a tour d'force. See my lists for a diversity of other recommended reading.

In two specific instances, the lack of context casts the CIA more negatively than it merits. The Indian nuclear test was missed in large part because the Pentagon was controlling the satellites and focusing them almost full time on Iraq. In Afghanistan, CIA not only performed heroically in establishing the geospatial foundation for precision air strikes, but it also had eyes on Bin Laden for four days, with Rumsfeld in one instance allowing the Pakistanis to evacuate 3000 Taliban and Al Qaeda, and General Franks in another refusing to put Rangers around Bin Laden, claiming it would take weeks. With such idiocy (or deliberate support for Al Qaeda) at the policy level, CIA can hardly be blamed for everything.

The author makes no mention of the reality that CIA was Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, nor does he review, as I do in The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption, both the long history of presidential and congressional commission dismay over CIA's lack of language skills and open source access and collegial relations with the Pentagon, and the fact that policy is always, invariably, responsible for as many high crimes, misdemeanors, and errors and omissions that comprise the massive betrayal of the public trust that the federal government has come to represent these past fifty years. See The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

On Dick Cheney, who escapes notice in this book, but whose disdain for the CIA is now somewhat more understandable to me, see my review and explicit list of 23 impeachable offenses that the book documents, offenses that should have seen Cheney removed from office two years ago. I refer to Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.

While Eisenhower's condemning “legacy of ashes” is in the title, the better bottom line comes in the body of the book: “A harvest of lies and a complete lack of intelligence.” Elsewhere the book abounds with hubris and arrogance, blindness, a propensity to slander and assassinate (ineptly). The CIA was “ham-handed and free-wheeling.”

The author draws on varied sources to characterize the clandestine service as skilled at “gross overstatement joined with grotesque incompetence.” The essence of the book and CIA's continuous record of bluster and failure is ably captured on page 126, “Cloaked yet flamboyant–that was the CIA under Allen Dulles. It was a place ‘where truly clandestine practices were compromised” while ‘analysis was clothed in an atmosphere of secrecy that was unnecessary, frequently counterproductive, and in the long run damaging,' Cline thought.”

A few gems:

* Truman wanted a global newspaper, not a cloak & dagger
* Truman was trumped by his own Pentagon, which wanted a spy service
* CIA directors routinely lied to presidents
* Most DCI's left CIA worse off than before
* FBI has more agents in NYC than CIA has case officers around the world
* From the beginning CIA repressed democracy, loved dictators and corruption
* Russians and Cubans have consistly broken all CIA efforts to penetrate (indeed, when all Cubans were doubled, two of my clandestine classmates had the pleasure of appearing on Cuban TV after being covertly filmed “in the act”)
* Thousands (sic) I believe hundreds of thousands, have died because of CIA complicity, errors, incompetence, or plain amorality.
* CIA brought into the USA 100 Nazis every year, the maximum allowed them
* CIA delusional, failed mission after failed mission (but all got promoted)
* P 53: “At CIA, an order is a departure point for a discussion.”
* CIA funded hundreds of “morally reprehensible suicide missions.”
* CIA constantly fell for fabricators, con men, and double agents
* CIA's scorecard in penetrating Manchuria: 101 killed, 111 captured. ALL.
* CIA has had clandestine prisions in Germany, Japan, and Panama, “like Guantanamo only worse.” Now they have others elsewhere.
* CIA all too quickly adopted the tactics of its enemies.
* Never, ever, has CIA had a sufficiency of linguists.
* When Iran took the Embassy, the CIA Station consisted of four officers, not one of whom spoke Farsi. The Iranians were offended.
* It was CIA that put the Bathists and ultimately Saddam Hussein in power.
* CIA's support for “strongmen” inspired populist insurrections.
* CIA suffered from cultural myopia, complete lack of languages, and antiquated information technology

This book destroys Allen Dulles for all time.

There is more but I recommend buying and purchasing this book, because as I write this America is in the midst of what may be the gavest Constitutional crisis of our time–an impotent Congress is allowing Dick Cheney to operate “without limits” in ways that are absolutely and unquestionably in clear violation of the Constitution in multiple ways.

As I put the book down, ignoring some of my notes for lack of word count, I saw two with which to end this review.

Robert Gates: “Adjust or die.” This book puts the final nail in the CIA coffin.

The author did not say, but my reading of the book creates the following note:

US Government a Ship of Fools, with immoral Presidents asking incompetent spies to be equally immoral, while pathetically inept Members of Congress stood idly by, the occasional commission notwithstanding.

Good people trapped in a very bad system where the pathologies of power nurture ideological fantasy and treason against the Republic.

Five other books (see lists also):
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

2007/07/072009/10/16

Review: Dunces of Doomsday–10 Blunders That Gave Rise to Radical Islam, Terrorist Regimes, And the Threat of an American Hiroshima

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad

Citizen's Primer on Failure of Government & Parties

July 7, 2007

Paul L. Williams

I like the reviews I see here, so rather than repeat them I will simply say that I know Paul Williams, his first book, Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You is first class, and both that book and this book are on my list of top 40 books for Earth Threat #9: Terrorism.

It should trouble all Americans that the US Government, under the failed congress (see The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders), parties (see Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It), and Dick Cheney (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, my long review itemizes the 23 high crimes and misdemeanors documented by the book), is focusing on terrorism rather than all ten threats. See my lists on threats, policies, and players.

I have put this book second in my list for terrorism, it is easier to read that Ralph Peters, but both books will make your blood boil. My own two books helpful to the public are available free at OSS.Net, but much more fun if you buy them in book form from Amazon:

The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

2007/06/222011/10/22

Review: In the Name of Democracy–American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Iraq

June 22, 2007

Jeremy Brecher

I confess to being uncomfortable when I bought this book, which addresses in a very comprehensive way the degree to which the US Government and the US military as well as intelligence, mercenary, and corporate personnel, are committing war crimes.

I want to say up front, that as best I can tell; our brave and professional troops are in fact making lemonade from lemons, and doing the best they can. However, they all realize that they and all the world was lied to by the Bush Administration, that this is about oil, and that they are killing civilians and many children for no good reason, due to the horrible circumstances that we have created by remaining there. According to this book, suicides are up 40%, there are 6000 deserters, and seamen recruits are *winning* when court-martialed for refusing to obey illegal orders to go to Iraq.

The editors have done a superb job of bringing together a collection of proven individuals including President Jimmy Carter, Senator Robert Byrd, Daniel Ellsberg, Sy Hersh, a group of US Generals (retired) protesting the White House mandated torture, and a wide variety of individual experts on war crimes.

The book opens with a discussion of three kinds of war crime:

1) Wars of aggression, i.e. unprovoked, pre-emptive, unjustified

2) Violations of humanitarian law

3) Crimes against humanity

You can read the book for the details. Suffice to say that they set the stage with objective factual discussion, and then proceed to document, most ably, the reality that the United States of America is now a war criminal in the larger context of humanity. What is being done “in our name” is immoral, reprehensible, unconstitutional, impeachable, and–to my great dismay–largely ignored by the majority of our adult population.

A few highlights from this easy to read collection of relatively short (2-4 page) pieces:

Ellsberg: Loyalty to the Constitution must take precedence at all levels. Like Viet-Nam, we are now realizing that the current regime cannot be trusted and can blunder strategically because the balance of power is out the door. Only We the People can demand a restoration of liberty & justice for all, with respect for the Constitutional limits to federal power.

Carter: Iraq war is an unjust illegal war. He says this as a President and as a Christian and as a loyal American who reveres the Constitution.

Herbert: Pentagon is “shopping for wars” even as Iraq hollows it out. They have even discussed surprise unprovoked military attacks whose only justification is the possibility of collecting intelligence. As an intelligence expert, I can afford that the secret intelligence community is largely worthless and costs over $60 billion a year, but I can also assert that for less than $5 billion a year, I can not only provide 96% of all the intelligence we need from open sources in 183 languages, but I can also provide free online education and free cell phone answers from reachback help desks in India.

Hersh: we and Israel plan to invade Iran regardless of what the facts are and regardless of what the American people believe or desire. Talking to Pentagon sources, Hersh sees us funding and training death squads around the world, turning the world into what one senior official called a “global free fire zone.”

Retired Generals: Torture was “top down” decision and command, not a few bottom up “rotten apples.”

Various: US using illegal weapons, including depleted uranium and napalm, in Iraq and elsewhere.

FBI emails (redacted): Military interrogators practicing torture impersonated FBI special agents, meaning that the FBI instead of DoD would be nailed in the public eye. FBI appears to have honored its own higher standards and not followed the idiot Gonzalez (then White House Counsel).

Center: detailed case against Donald Rumsfeld for ordering, funding, and knowing of war crimes at all levels of command. Why they did not go after Bush and even more so, Dick Cheney, whose 25 high crimes and offenses have been itemized in my reviews of ONE PERCENT and VICE.

Roberts: No one left to stop them (within the government)

Falk speaks about accountability.

The book ends with four recommendations:

1) Halt the war crimes

2) Bring the war criminals to justice

3) Draw the lessons (the most obvious: don't throw stones if you live in a glass house)

4) Establish barriers to future war crimes.

A one-page appendix lists 22 relevant substantive web sites containing additional information.

Sadly, as good as this book is, it is a cry in the wilderness. It is not being used by any major transpartisan organization (such as Reuniting America and its members Moral Majority, the ACLU, MoveOn, and others totaling 110 individual members in all).

I truly grieve over how low our Nation has gone. The Republic no longer exists–every politician–every single one–is in violation of the Constitution and impeachable for their dereliction of duty in allowing Cheney and his puppet Bush to wreak havoc on the world and on our own citizens, whose loss of moral standing, national treasure, and an assured future will take at least a quarter century to remediate.

See my lists for a fast survey of books relevant to impeachment, to judging Cheney, to the good and the bad of religion within affairs of state, on why they hate us, and so on. If there is one slim chance for our future, it is that on this 4th of July we will all declare our independence from this illegal White House, demand the immediate resignations of these two war criminals (who, not incidentally, stole two elections in a row), and reconstitute the government by forcing all those now in Congress to either pass Electoral Reform prior to November 2008, or be recalled and “ordered home.”

The monkey is now on our backs. What are we going to do?

EDITED 4 Sep 07 to use new link capability to add other recommended books and DVDs.
Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
9/11 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions
9/11: Press For Truth
Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11

2007/06/182009/10/16

Review: Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

5 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq

The One Book No US Politician Will Read, That You SHOULD Read

June 18, 2007

Barry M. Lando

This is one of two books that I have read together, both documenting the decades of deceit by both the US and UK governments, and to a much lesser degree, by France, Germany, and Russia, among others.

The two compelling facts that stay with me as I put the book down, are two:

1) From Churchill to Kennedy to Bush (Cheney), all of our Presidents in the US, but most especially Reagan, Bush, Clinton (Brzezinski), and the current and failed crew of neo conservatives that use Bush Junior as a talking doll, have been complicit–let me spell that again–complicit in the mass murders, the massacres, the torture that we first condoned and now practice ourselves. The US White House denizens are all long overdue for formal indictment, at least by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The author documents, very ably, a long string of broken promises (e.g. to the Bedouin leader for a free Arab state in return for help in WWI, to the Kurds, etc.) and complicity in mass murder. In the author's views, the sanctions are a war crime against the children, women, and elderly of Iraq, a war crime that lasted thirteen years.

2) Salaam Hussein was a creature spawned in large part by the CIA. Although I have spent 30 years in the intelligence business, it was not until I embarked on my broad non-fiction reading program that I have been able to understand that the CIA specifically, but all the rest of the classified intelligence community, is complicit in mass murders, genocides, running cocaine into the US to wipe out poor communities now addicted to crack, made affordable by the CIA's drug runners, and made politically kosher because Wall Street demands drug money–laundered drug money–for its liquidity.

I join Lee Iacocca in asking, “Where is the outrage?” There is not a candidate for President today, not even Ron Paul, who can outline in chapter and verse, as I now can on the shoulders of the 900+ authors whose hard-earned insights I have absorbed these past six years, the evil that Lionel Tiger and others show is inherent in industrialization and the centralization of power. We need to destroy the current corrupt elections process, implement electoral reform across the board, and start putting bright honorable people in office, instead of these nakedly immoral and profoundly evil creatures who will inflict any sacrifice, impose any burden, on We the People so that they may profit.

A few of the many gems from this superb work:

1) All our Presidents in recent time have lied to us, and the most humiliating of all of these lies was not the weapons of mass destruction, but the abandonment of the Kurds and the refusal to listen when Iraqi generals approached Iraqi dissidents who in turn came to the Department of State only to be shunned away. Salaam Hussein promised to leave Kuwait, but US wanted to destroy his army, and refused to hold off on what proved to be 40 hours of pure slaughter. Gulf II was not only more lies, but the active suppression of facts and dissident views, not least of which were General Tony Zinni's views–he was called a traitor by Condolezza Rice, who appears to know nothing of honor, decency, and truthfulness.

2) CIA is creating more long-term havoc than it is worth. I am finally persuaded, with absolute certainty, that we need to get out of the covert action business. CIA should become the National Analysis Agency, and the small clandestine arm should be limited to multinational operations against transnational crime and terrorism, with an Inspector General in every Station.

3) Jimmy Carter, advised by Zbig Brzezinski, comes out of this book looking both more ignorant and more unscrupulous than Reagan or either of the Bushies. Brzezinski not only masterminded the tacit okay for Pakistani development of nuclear weapons in return for aid in Afghanistan, he also began the process of helping Salaam Hussein acquire, develop, and utilize weapons of mass destruction, and I hold Brzezinski directly accountable for the mass murder of Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and Iranians.

There are many other notes from this book that I have, but rather than lay them out here I am going to simply say that this book moves to the top of my list of books on evaluating the Iraq misadventure that has given us a $2 trillion debt and 75,000 amputees whose lives are forever shattered ***for no good reason***

The betrayal of the public trust by both the Executive and Congress, by both politicians and senior civil servants and military flag officers, has been outrageous. The author uses the words ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, amorality, illegality, hypocrisy, and cynicism sparingly. This is not a vendetta book. This is a reasons indictment and joins a host of other books that demand the immediate impeachment not only of the sitting President and Vice President, but also of the Republican ***and*** Democratic leadership in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

I am ashamed of our Republic and what these amoral thieves have done “in our name.” I am disheartened by the knowledge that all of our brave troops have died, been disabled, and suffered for ***no good reason.*** This makes me very angry. Angry enough to begin speaking out, pleading with America to wake up and find within itself the means for a non-violent restoration of the Constitution and We the People as individuals with liberty for all, lest America be disgraced, and our children's' futures sacrificed, forevermore. Shame, shame, shame.

Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) (American Empire Project)
Unintended Consequences: The United States at War
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Statecraft as Soulcraft
Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025

2007/06/152009/10/16

Review: Interventions

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Gems of Tough Love, Hope & Inspiration

June 15, 2007

Noam Chomsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception : How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Bush's Brain Why We Fight

2007/06/092015/04/26

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

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

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

Gary Webb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book ends with a revelation and an observation.

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

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

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

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

2007/05/052009/12/04

Review: At the Center of the Storm–My Years at the CIA

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Deceptive Beginning, Vital Middle, Disappointing End,

May 5, 2007

George Tenet

This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.

The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer–these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.

The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers–a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.

He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA “for repairs.” I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the “front” of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational “dirty deeds” arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.

In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the “paradigms of failure” (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that “time and technology [have] passed us by.”

As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called “Open Sores” within the now near-moronic secret world).

The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on “The Threat Matrix” and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.

The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.

On page 317 he tells us that “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts.”

He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).

He defends himself on the “slam dunk” as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.

He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that “there is no doubt” on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.

He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that “Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”

The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.

He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.

Pre 9/11 air travelers believed “be calm, see Cuba” when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a “Smart Nation.”

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You
The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

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Category: Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Review: Legacy of Ashes–The History of the CIA