Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback – Page 40

2003/09/252018/09/07

Review: Gold Warriors–America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold UPDATE to Add Links to CDs

5 Star, Corruption, Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Military & Pentagon Power, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Earth-Shattering, Faith-Shaking, Well-Documented Deceit,

September 25, 2003

Sterling Seagrave

This book is earth-shattering and faith-shaking, a well-documented tale of deceit at the highest levels of the US government. So controversial and potentially explosive are the findings of this book, to wit, that the White House recovered most of the Nazi and Japanese loot and created a secret slush fund for covert political operations world-wide, that the authors go the extra mile and offer, at a nominal price, two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 pages of supporting documentation including the Japanese treasure maps used by the US to recover the gold and other valuables.Major players include Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, both Allen and John Foster Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, John McCloy, and the famous unconventional warrior Edward Lansdale. What we learn from this book is that those writing about “blowback” (the consequences of unwise US actions) have barely scratched the surface. What we learn is that rather than truly seeking to help the Japanese, Chinese, and other looted nations recover in the aftermath of WWII, the most senior leaders of the US government, no doubt with the best of intentions, actually conspired with Nazi bankers and the Japanese imperial family to create a Black Eagle Trust controlled by a very select hand-picked cabal in Washington.

Originally used to fight communism, the Black Eagle Trust, according to the authors and as thoroughly documented by the book and the two CD-ROMS (which I am happy to have in hand), quickly became a global slush fund used to bribe national leaders and manipulate elections around the world. This fund remains in existence today, making the Swiss Holocaust funds seem like loose-change. According to the authors, major banks are “addicted” to the funds and would face collapse if public investigations resulted in a forced return of this gold and related certificates to the rightful owners.

The authors have produced a magnificent work of both scholarship and investigative journalism. They document the extent of Japanese looting of Korea (beginning in 1895) and China as well as the other countries in the “co-prosperity sphere.” They document the manner in which Japan hid most of the gold in the Philippines (some in Indonesia), and were forced to leave it there from 1943 onwards, when US submarine interdiction became too effective to risk shipments homeward.

I found the level of detail in this book to be quite gripping. The ingenious nature of the Japanese burial sites, with caverns below the more obvious tunnels, with sea-water protection, with maps created in reverse–and the in-bred cruelty of the Japanese, thinking nothing of burying all of the US and other national slave labor *and the Japanese engineers* alive as the final stage of protecting the looted treasure, leave one stunned.

The authors document the central role played by Lansdale in recognizing the opportunity and then briefing MacArthur and then President Truman. According to the authors, the architects of the Black Eagle Trust were three advisors to President's Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: John McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense), and Robert Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury). They made the case to Roosevelt, and presumably to Truman after Roosevelt died, that it would be impractical to return the looted gold to the rightful owners, in part because many of the looted countries were now under Soviet control.

The authors, who conducted many interviews in support of the work, including interviews of former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who they say was involved with Lansdale and the gold in the 1940's and remained involved with the black gold through the 1980's, provide copies of documents showing the redirection of the looted gold to 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. The gold was then used to support the creation of gold bearer certificates that were in turned used to bribe the most senior officials around the world.

The authors tell a shocking tale of how quickly MacArthur chose to collaborate with the very leadership of Japan that declared war on the USA and was responsible for genocide and looting in Asia on a scale rarely achieved by anyone else. Bringing the story up to date, the authors show how prior attempts to investigate the Black Eagle Trust have led to the ruin of individuals such as Norbert Schlei, at one time deputy attorney general to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. While I have no direct knowledge and cannot be certain myself, I believe the authors have provided a sufficiently compelling case to warrant an international investigation concurrently with a General Accounting Office investigation to be chartered by Congress with unlimited supeona powers specifically directed against classified personalities and archives.

If this story is true, and I personally think that it is, then the US government, in active collusion with the very people the American people fought to defeat in WWII, has been guilty of fraud and depravity on a global scale and against the best interests of both the American people, and the against the rightful owners of the looted gold and other treasures. The authors may well have uncovered the last really big secret of the post-WW II era, and in so doing, opened the way for a restoration of the balance of power among diverse nations, and a sharp delimitation of the abuses that appear to characterize American leadership when it thinks it can rely on secret gold and stolen oil to engage in imperial adventures and domestic improprieties. As an American citizen and voter, and as a person of faith who believes that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, I find this book to be shocking, credible, and a basis for popular outrage and demands for truth and reconciliation.

UPDATE: The below links have NOT been tested.

CD1) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BhNOJWR2I3oYrmCZV2mrBhq3ff2xY8gh?usp=sharing

CD2) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sLqiNhnW1fN_u1DM5ZOPiR3XzL1y9BZe?usp=sharing

CD3) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YYaIlVqHW8RJWUd6eRIqSbaefJNAC17p?usp=sharing

2003/09/242009/12/04

Review: Intelligence and the War in Bosnia–1992-1995 (Perspectives on Intelligence History)

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Force Structure (Military), History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Unique Blend of Lessons Learned and Tutorial on Intelligence,

September 24, 2003

Cees Wiebes

This is a superb publication. An American, who would never have received the kind of direct official support provided to the author by the government of The Netherlands, could not have written it.This is the only book that I know of that fully integrates deliberate studies of UN intelligence; Western and NATO intelligence (which the author correctly notes does not exist); Dutch intelligence; and belligerent party intelligence.

Several recurring themes of lasting value emerged from my reading of this book:

1) The UN is dangerously devoid of intelligence qua decision-support. The culture of the UN leadership, the UN bureaucracy, and the UN delegates is one that places a higher priority on the semblance–the mockery–of lip service to open sources and legal methods, while sacrificing the lives of UN forces in the field. One cannot read this book, and its superb documentation of how UN Force Commander after UN Force Commander pleaded for intelligence support, only to be told no by the staff in New York, without becoming very angry. This book makes it perfectly clear that the UN leadership failed the Croats, the Serbs, and the international peacekeepers, in every possible way. Toward the end of the book the author also focuses on the UN as a source for the belligerents, i.e. UN incapacity for operational security and secure communications in fact makes it a primary source for belligerents seeking to kill one another.

2) The West failed in Bosnia in part because it became over-reliant on technical intelligence (which it could not process or analyze with sufficient speed and reliability), and did not have adequate numbers of competent clandestine Human Intelligence (HUMINT) or even ground-truth observers in the region. A contributing source of failure was the evidently deliberate decision on the part of the Clinton White House to downplay the conflict and to withhold such intelligence warning as they did have from the UN, in the misplaced belief that sharing such information would interfere with the peace process. Tens of thousands died because of Clinton White House irresponsibility.

3) Intelligence “liaison” or structured sharing across national boundaries, was an ungodly mess made worse by the inherent biases and rose-colored glasses worn by the Americans and the British on one side, and the French and the Germans on the other. “Wishful thinking” by policy makers interfered with proper assessments of the relative condition and intentions of the various belligerents.

4) The CIA clandestine endeavor was split, with one Station operating out of Sarajevo and another out of Zagreb, and no overall coordination or integration of sources and reports.

5) Civil Affairs (CA) as a military occupational specialty is blown forever by CIA Directorate of Operations (DO) abuses, most without the permission of the U.S. European theater commander. CIA/DO managers should be disciplined for this breach of internal US government protocols.

6) The Dutch were not ready to field a major operational or tactical intelligence support architecture, and in-fighting among various elements prevented the various analysts from making the most of what little they could glean from varied sources. The same was actually true of all Western intelligence communities–all had other priorities and too few resources [although language deficiencies are not emphasized by the author, one presumed a grotesque lack of required competencies across the Croat and Serb dialects as well as Yugoslavian, Turkish, and Arabic]. In the view of a senior officer whose quotations close Chapter 3, heads should be rolling for dereliction of duty–although the subject refers only to the Dutch, the reviewer would add US and British heads as well.

7) The book excels–is remarkable and perhaps unique–for its discussion of the secret arms supplies–not only the routes, the providers, the landing zone delivery means–but the active violation by the US of the embargo, and the active role of US Special Forces in violating the embargo without a covert action “finding”, and hence also in violation of US law. Other nations were equally at fault. It is clear from the book that the UN needs not only operational and tactical intelligence for the specific area of operations, but an extended intelligence and operational capability sufficient to *interdict* incoming arms to the belligerents. This book may well be the single best reference on this topic.

8) The sections of the book on signals and imagery intelligence are a work of art, combining historical scholarship with original research and a very fine tutorial aspect. The listing of the 11 disadvantages of SIGINT (pages 224-228) is the finest I have ever seen. The bottom line in both instances is: too much collection, too little processing and analysis. The author uses a remarkable quote from a former Director of the National Security Agency to make this point: good news is that we can exploit a million messages a day; bad news is that we don't know which million out of the billions we capture to do… Also interesting is the detailed accounting of belligerent party competencies in SIGINT and IMINT, to include the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and advanced methods.

9) The book ends with two notes that I choose to emphasize, although the author makes many valuable observations in his conclusions that I will not repeat here: first, support to UN operations was the *fifth* priority for Western intelligence, coming after force protection, after ground truth observation, after support for air targeting, and after support for NATO ground troop planning; and second, Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization, was the *only* entity to get true validated warning of the Srebrenica genocide.

The index is terrible-names only. Properly indexing the book for references to all intelligence sources and methods as well as events and practices, would make it 2X to 3X more valuable as a basic reference.

This book is highly recommended and a “must have” for every national security and international affairs library, and for every professional interested in peacekeeping intelligence.

2003/09/192009/12/04

Review: The Eagle’s Shadow–Why America Fascinates And Infuriates The World

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Of 1000+ Books on National Security, This Is 1 of Top 10,

September 13, 2003

Mark Hertsgaard

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

This review has been edited (giving up 14 votes) to eliminate an inappropriate and premature designation of Howard Dean as “the one”. Regardless of who helps America to regain its balance, this book is 1 of a handfull utterly brilliant contributions that everyone should buy and read and discuss.

As the only reviewer for Amazon who focuses exclusively on national security non-fiction, across the categories of information; intelligence; emerging threats; strategy & force structure; blowback, international relations, and dissent; and US political, leadership, and the future of life; I want to say quite clearly that I regard this book as one of the three “must reads” for every American between now and November 2008. The other two are #1 William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and #2, Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

This book is solid, serious truth-telling. Those reviewers, including the so-called professional editorial reviewers, who demean this book are simply revealing their narrow self-centered arrogance–precisely the quality in many Americans that is most distressing to the rest of the world. I find it of considerable importance that this book is favorably considered by the major intellectual newspapers and magazines across Europe and in the US, and including The Economist, the Christian Scientist Monitor, and Salon.com.

Easy to read, well-organized, this is a story, not a documentary, and it should be appreciated in that light. On page 10 the book's main argument is perfectly captured by a quote from a South African: “we know everything about you [Americans] and you know nothing about us.” Therein lies the problem. As the author notes later in the book, after a review of the decrepitude of both our media and our educational systems in relation to foreign affairs and national security, “Ignorance is an excuse, but it is no shield.”

Although I have reviewed many other books that have much more detail and are more documentary in nature, I give this author credit for telling a story that is comprehensible and compelling to the normal citizen, one already disadvantaged by a mediocre news services and functionalist schools that do not teach, as I do, that the world has 32 complex emergencies (failed states), 66 countries distressed by tens of millions of displaced persons, 33 countries with massive starvation as a daily fact of life, 59 countries with plagues and epidemics this very day. There are also 18 genocide campaigns that everyone is ignoring, this very day, massive water scarcity, energy scarcity at the poverty level, and corruption and censorship across 80 and 62 countries. America has no clue….it is not only the average citizen that is ignorant, but the average elected official and the average federal bureaucrat as well. This book helps remedy that situation.

The author does a fine job of distilling both a broad literature and a broad survey of foreign views through direct interview, and it is a job good enough to put this book into my “top three” for the year.

I will end by saying that this book persuaded me that the US has become a Third World nation, a lower-tier disadvantaged nation, in many respects. Apart from the critical infrastructure, which has not been refurbished in a quarter century because of the fraud perpetuated on the public by deregulation, and the massive poverty, prisons, poor health, and so on, what we have in America today is massive injustice and a massive concentration of wealth so outrageous that in any other country it would have led to a violent revolution.

This book has persuaded me that America needs not one, but two Truth & Reconciliation Commissions. We need a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, ideally managed by Colin Powell, to investigate the perversion of both capitalism and democracy in the US, and to outline a way forward such as William Greider discusses in “The Soul of Capitalism.” We also need, even more desperately, a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, ideally managed by Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew, to catalog and acknowledge, and apologize to the world for, the war crimes, the unethical behavior, and the enormous political, social, cultural, economic, demographic, and natural resource costs we have imposed on the world through our ignorance and arrogance.

There are six billion people out there, waiting to see how America handles the emerging Reichstag known as the neo-conservative Cheney-Bush regime. We cannot kill them nor contain them with force–as Jonathan Schell notes in “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” there is one path and one path only toward a bright future: non-violent cooperative collective power.

If every American reads this book, and every American votes in an informed manner in November 2008, we can save the world and in the process save America.

2003/09/132019/09/06

Review: The Unconquerable World–Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

7 Star Top 1%, America (Anti-America), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Future, History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Public Administration, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

7 Star Life Transformative Restores Faith, Non-Violent Restoration of People Power,

September 13, 2003

Jonathan Schell

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links

This book, together with William Geider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and Mark Hertsgaard's The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, in one of three that I believe every American needs to read between now and November 2004.

Across 13 chapters in four parts, the author provides a balanced overview of historical philosophy and practice at both the national level “relations among nations” and the local level (“relations among beings”). His bottom line: that the separation of church and state, and the divorce of social responsibility from both state and corporate actions, have so corrupted the political and economic governance architectures as to make them pathologically dangerous.

His entire book discusses how people can come together, non-violently, to restore both their power over capital and over circumstances, and the social meaning and values that have been abandoned by “objective” corporations and governments.

The book has applicability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where the US is foolishly confusing military power with political power. As he says early on, it is the public *will* that must be gained, the public *consent* to a new order–in the absence of this, which certainly does not exist in either Iraq or Afghanistan, no amount of military power will be effective (to which I would add: and the cumulative effect of the financial and social cost of these military interventions without end will have a reverse political, economic, and social cost on the invader that may make the military action a self-inflicted wound of great proportions).

Across the book, the author examines three prevailing models for global relations: the universal empire model, the balance of power model, and the collective security model. He comes down overwhelmingly on the side of the latter as the only viable approach to current and future global stability and prosperity.

A quote from the middle of the book captures its thesis perfectly: “Violence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.”

Taking off from the above, the author elaborates on three sub-themes:

First, that cooperative power is much greater, less expensive, and more lasting that coercive power.

Second, that capitalism today is a scourge on humanity, inflicting far greater damage–deaths, disease, poverty, etcetera–that military power, even the “shock and awe” power unleashed against Afghanistan and Iraq without public debate.

Third, and he draws heavily on Hannah Arendt, here a quote that should shame the current US Administration because it is so contradictory to their belief in “noble lies”–lies that Hitler and Goering would have admired. She says, “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

Toward the end of the book the author addresses the dysfunctionality of the current “absolute sovereignty” model and concludes that in an era of globalization, not only must the US respect regional and international sovereignty as an over-lapping authority, but that we must (as Richard Falk recommended in the 1970's) begin to recognize people's or nations as distinct entities with culturally-sovereign rights that over-lap the states within which the people's reside–this would certainly apply to the Kurds, spread across several states, and it should also apply to the Jews and to the Palestinians, among many others.

On the last page, he says that we have a choice between survival and annihilation. We can carry on with unilateral violence, or we the people can take back the power, change direction, and elect a government that believes in cooperative non-violence, the only path to survival that appears to the author, and to this reviewer, as viable.

This is a *very* important book, and it merits careful reading by every adult who wishes to leave their children a world of peace and prosperity. We can do better. What we are doing now is destructive in every sense of the word.

2003/08/312009/12/04

Review: Defense Facts of Life–The Plans/Reality Mismatch

6 Star Top 10%, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Core Ideas Relevant to Imminent Defense Reform,

August 31, 2003

Franklin Spinney

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add comment and link.

Comment: This book should be updated and reprinted in time for November 2008.

Chuck Spinney, who made the cover of TIME in the 1980's as a whistle-blower on defense waste and mismanagement, has in this book presented a readable, well-documented and well-illustrated account of how virtually every single weapons and mobility system now in the Pentagon system is over-priced, over-weight, over-budget, and not able to perform as advertised. Although out-of-print, there are hundreds of copies of this book that can be obtained via Amazon's used book channels, and the author is writing a sequel that will be easier to understand if this book is digested first.

In addressing the plans reality mismatch, the author is very effectively demonstrating that doctrine, technology and the budget are completely divorced from both real world threats, and real world logistics.

With superb assistance from the editor, James Clay Thompson, who has converted the author's Pentagon-speak to plain English, the author documents the insanity and the irresponsibility of how we continue to spend the taxpayer dollar on so-called defense. I say so-called because the Emperor has no clothes. We can invade a country, but we cannot stop terrorism or keep our electrical system going reliably.

Just one little vignette illustrates how jam-packed this book is with facts. Discussing the F-15 and the move toward replaceable units as a means of reducing forward-deployed repair specialists and spare parts, the author blows the lid off the whole system. It all comes down to the three computers each squadron of 24 F-15's needs to diagnose its 1080 line-replaceable units. 1) It turns out the three computers work 80% of the time. 2) It takes up to 30 minutes to connect the computer to an interface test adapter. 3) It takes an average of three hours and as many as eight hours for the computer to carry out a diagnostic reading of a single line-replaceable unit. 4) Very often the computer fails to replicate the problem, with lack of resolution fluctuating at between 25 and 41 percent of the time. 5) At the time Spinney wrote the book, and probably still today, not a single Air Force avionics technician was re-enlisting, because they could get three times the money, and a much better quality of life, by taking their taxpayer-funded training into the private sector.

Spinney ends his book by saying, “In a nutshell, Pentagon economics discount the present and inflate the future. Put another way, the future consequences of today's decisions are economically unrealistic plans that reduce current ability to meet the threat in order to make room (hopefully) for future money to meet a hypothetical threat. … The across-the-board thrust toward ever-increasing technological complexity is simply not working.”

It is not the book's purpose to propose an alternative national security strategy and a commensurate change in how America devises its concepts, doctrine, and capabilities for making war and enforcing peace, but if one reads the book by Robert Coram, “BOYD: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” and also the book edited by Dr. Col. Max Manwaring et al, “Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the 21st Century,” a picture will emerge. People first, ideas second, hardware last. The ideas in this book, although ignored in the 20 years since they were first articulated, are certain to play a large role in the redesign and redirection of the U.S. national security community over the next ten years.

More recent books:
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

2003/08/172009/12/04

Review: War is a Racket–The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Insurgency & Revolution, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, War & Face of Battle

Decorated Marine General Cannot Be Ignored,

August 17, 2003

Smedley D. Butler

EDITED from 17 Aug 03 to add book links.

This book is a real gem, a classic, that should be in any library desiring to focus on national security. It is a very readable collection of short essays, ending with a concise collection of photographs that show the horror of war–on one page in particular, a pile of artillery shells labeled “Cause” and below is a photo of a massive pile of bodies, labeled “Effect.”

Of particular interest to anyone concerned about the current national security situation, both its expensive mis-adventures abroad and its intrusive violation of many Constitutional rights at home, is the author's history, not only as a the most decorated Marine at the time, with campaign experience all over the world, but as a spokesperson, in retirement, for placing constitutional American principles over imperialist American practice.

The following quotations from the book are intended to summarize it:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” [p. 10]

“War is a racket. …It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” [p. 23]

“The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.” [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

This decorated Marine, who understands and documents in detail the exorbitant profits that a select few insiders (hence the term “racket”) make from war, proposes three specific anti-war measures:

1) Take the profit out of war. Nationalize and mobilize the industrial sector, and pay every manager no more than each soldier earns.

2) Vote for war or no war on the basis of a limited plebisite in which only those being asked to bear arms and die for their country are permitted to vote.

3) Limit US military forces, by Constitutional amendment, to home defense purposes only.

There is a great deal of wisdom and practical experience in this small book–Smedley Butler is to war profiteering what S.L.A. Marshall is to “the soldier's load.” While a globalized world and the complex integration of both national and non-national interests do seem to require a global national security strategy and a means of exerting global influence, I am convinced that he is correct about the fundamentals: we must take the profit out of war, and restore the voice of the people in the matter of making war.

The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Why We Fight
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Lessons of History
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

2003/07/292009/12/04

Review: Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Compelling Condemnation of Crude Corruption,

July 29, 2003

Robert Baer

Edit of 22 Dec to add links. Book is available in paperback.

Former spy Robert Baer, author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, makes the leap from intelligence reformist to national mentor with his new book, “SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.” Indeed, his last sentence has the White House laying in the moonlight with its legs spread, lustfully eyeing the Saudi wallet on the bureau.

This is an extraordinary compelling work, not least because it provides detailed and documented discovery not previously available, of how the U.S. government has over the course of several administrations made a deliberate decision to a) not spy on the Arab countries, b) not collect and read open sources in Arabic, c) not attempt to understand the sub-state actors such as the Muslim brotherhood, despite a long history in which these groups commit suicide to achieve their objectives, including the murder of several heads of state.

Baer's most brutal points should make every American shudder: it is America itself that is subsidizing terrorism, as well as the corruption of the Saudi royal family. Baer's documented estimate is that $1 dollar from every barrel of petroleum is spent on Saudi royal family sexual misbehavior, and $1.50 of every barrel of petroleum bought by America ultimately ends up funding extremist schools, foundations, and terrorist groups.

Baer has “gone back in time” to document how all of this terrorism began in the 1970's, but despite its terrible local consequences (including the assassination of heads of state), was ignored by Washington as “a local problem.”

In one lovely real-life account, Baer, then duty officer at CIA while Iraq poised to invade Kuwait, found that the $35 billion per year system was useless, impotent. It came down to his calling the chief of station in Kuwait, who called a border guard, who lifted his binoculars and described the Iraqi tanks stopped for lunch. Baer says: “As I waited, I wondered: Is this what all that money for intelligence is buying us? A pair of binoculars?”

Baer joins with Robert Kaplan in concluding that democracy in Arabia would be an out and out disaster. The decades of Islamic extremism and anti-Americanism run amok cannot be resolved by democratic elections because the very people who most hate America will be elected. Baer observes that “strongman tactics” such as used by Saddam Hussein and by the Syrian leadership–including a “scorched earth” campaign against the internal terrorist groups–are a more stable “rule of law”. One can conclude that the US has made a mistake in destabilizing Iraq, and that the imposition of a democratic solution in Iraq will turn out to be vastly more difficult, and vastly more expensive, than the naive neo-conservatives understood when they set forth without bothering to establish who was in the majority within the population being “liberated.”

Saudi Arabia has bought and paid for all the White House and Congressional influence it needs. This is why the recently released 9-11 report contains no mention of the secret documentation of Saudi Arabian complicity in the terrorism that took 3,000 American lives. As Senator Shelby noted on PBS NewsHour recently (he has read the secret report), 93% of the blanked out pages, and specifically those on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism against America and other nations, is a “con man's” effort to avoid “embarrassment.” As the families of the 9-11 victims have said, “we need to know.”

Baer is extraordinary. He was a success as a case officer (a clandestine representive of America dealing with traitors and terrorists under conditions of extreme risk), and he has now become a sort of “Patrick Henry” of the modern era, warning us in clear and compelling terms that White House corruption (a non-partisan recurring corruption) and Saudi Arabia are the twin swords upon which this great Nation may yet impale itself.

Other books Americans need to read (or at least read the reviews):
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
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
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition