Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform) – Page 42

2006/06/202009/12/04

Review: Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy (Paperback)

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Instant Classic, for Students and Experts Alike,

June 20, 2006

Loch K Johnson

In 1983, Dr. Loch Johnson, arguably the Dean of the intelligence scholars who is also unique for having the deep insights that could only come from service on BOTH the Church Committee in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, published “Seven Sins of Strategic Intelligence in World Affairs (Fall 1983, v. 146, no. 2, p. 176-204). I still remember that article, which informed me as a (then) clandestine case officer, and helped inspire my own critical reformist writings over the years.

This book is a completely new work on a grander scale and the seven sins (listed in the editorial information) are applied to foreign policy in all its forms.

The following quote reflects the rich content of the book:

“A foreign policy initiative is considered questionable (‘sinful') if it is based on a false or sharply limited understanding of the region of the world it pupports to address; if it violates the bedrock constitutional tenet of power-sharing between the legislative and executive branches of government; if it too quickly or unnecessarily resorts to forcein the resolution of global disputes; if it runs counter to the established norms of contemporary international behavior accepted by the world's democracies; if it signals a withdrawal from the international community; if it exhibits a lack of concern for the basic human needs of other nations or projects a haughtiness in world affairs indicative of an imperious attitude toward others.”

The rest of the book, including useful figures showing successs and failures across diplomatic, military, economic, and covert action fronts from 1945 to date, fleshes out the above quote in a very thoughtful manner.

Interestingly, deep in the book, the author points out that ignorance of global reality by the public is directly related to their choices of elected officials. If they are disengaged and uninformed, they will elect individuals who give short shrift to global affairs. I am reminded of the number of Senators and Representatives who used to brag that they did not have a passport “because nothing that happens abroad matters to my constituents.” Those individuals are still in office.

I know the author, who in his courtly manner and gracious ability to discuss all sides without rancor, while still being harshly critical, represents all that is good about informed academics who are also, from time to time, called on to serve the Nation. I put the book down thinking that this author would make a magnificent Secretary of State.

2006/06/162011/10/22

Review: How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok (Paperback)

Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics

Amazon Page

Fine Book by Constitutional Lawyer, Read with “The Case for Impeachment”,

June 16, 2006

Glenn Greenwald

This is a fine book, by a constitutional lawyer, and it focuses largely on how the Bush White House had violated all of the constitutional provisions with respect to checks and balances. On page 79 the author says, after a lengthy discussion, that “the president possessess the power neither to make laws nor to interpret them.” That is of, course, the heart of the matter.

An earlier quote (page 15) sums up the why: “Unbridaled extremism and contempt for the legal limits imposed by Congress and the Courts.”

The author does a fine job of quoting from the Federalist Papers to illustrate just how severe are the violations of the intent of the Founding Fathers by the incumbent President.

This book, which ends with an Epilogue on Iran and the fact that the incumbent President is using the terrorism card to justify any action anywhere, does not make the case for impeachment as ably as another book (see below). It focuses mostly on the NSA wire-tapping.

I strongly recommend this book be bought and read together with Senator Robert Byrd's Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency and The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office by Dave Lindorg and Barbara Oshasky.” Below is an extract from my review of the latter book:

BEGIN EXTRACT The Republicans set the stage for hard-ball when they actually impeached President Clinton, not for having oral sex with an intern, but for lying about it. This book lists ten specific documented reasons for impeaching President Bush:

1. Stole Florida election in 2005.
2. Lied on Iraq to Congress, the Public, and the United Nations.
3. 9-11 Cover-Up and Obstruction of Justice.
4. Violated Rights of Citizens including Habeas Corpus.
5. NSA Program to Listen to Citizens without Warrant.
6. Violated International Treaties Including Geneva Convention.
7. Actively Encouraged, as a Policy, Use of Torture.
8. Gross Negligence on Hurricane Katrina.
9. Iraq Contract Corruption–Bremer “Lost” $8 billion in cash, sole source awards, and gross negligence in managing the peace.
10. Stole Ohio election in 2004.

This book is not just an indictment on the specifics, it is also a very useful primer for citizens on the purpose and process of impeachment. END EXTRACT.

Both books, together, make it clear that any time the American people want to force Congress, on threat of not being re-elected, to impeach this President, he is toast. The question then arises, are *enough* citizens paying attention?

Sometime after reading this book, I read three books that focus on the failure of Congress:
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we need to dump virtually every single Senator and every single Representative, demand an Electoral Reform Act, and end the ‘wnnier take all” nonsence for both the Congressional leadership positions and the Cabinet. Transpartisan leaders with a balanced budget, that's the ticket!

2006/06/162011/10/22

Review: Hostile Takeover–How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government–and How We Take It Back (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Amazon Page

Serious Book for Serious People,

June 16, 2006

David Sirota

I bought and read both this book, and John Stossel's Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel – Why Everything You Know is Wrong This is a serious book for serious people. Stossel's book is full of trivia and generally a waste of time.

This author focuses on the substance of taxes, wages, jobs, debt, pensions, health care, prescription drugs, energy, unions, and legal rights, and he does it in an engaging methodical manner that discusses the issue, highlights in turn myths, lies, and half-truths, and then ends with proposed solutions, all of them sensible.

It merits comment that this book is endorsed on the back cover by many people I respect from Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming to Bill Greider Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy and The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy to Jim Hightower Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back.

The bottom line is clear: the U.S. government at the political level, whether Republican or Democratic, is completely corrupt. Every Congressman and every President, every Senator, have so many conflicts of interest as to be incapable of representing the people honestly. Congress no longer represents the people. Let me repeat that: Congress no longer represents the people. They are either bribed by special interests or forced to follow the party line. See, with reviews: Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; 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.

This author ends with a sensible bottom line: engage from the bottom up, and push for public financing of elections (I would include free television time from the PUBLIC airwaves), and until then, contribute to honest politicians who will forego campaign contributions.

The Unity '08 movement established by Hamilton Jordan proposes to field an Independent candidate fully funded by the people. As Joe Trippi and Howard Dean demonstrated, the people CAN out-spend and out-vote the corporations if they have a mind to. Jordon is half-way to the right answer–the rest of the answer is a Democratic President, a Republican Vice-President, two new Deputy Vice Presidents (John McCain for national security, overseeing Defense, State, and Justice, and Bill Bradley for everything else), and a COALITION cabinent. Separately a NON-RIVAL party has been created, the Citizens Party, to post a transparent national budget that is also balanced, and to engage voters from ALL parties in support of one single public interest issue: electoral reform in 2007, in time for an honest election the extremist Republicans cannot steal as they stole in 2000 via Florida and in 2004 via Ohio.

Lest anyone doubt the depth of this book's documented concerns, see my review of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office by Dave Lindorf and Barbara Olshansky, and also How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok by constituional lawyer Gleen Greenwald.

For a list of 23 documented high crimes and misdemeanors by Dick Cheney,see my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

2006/05/062009/12/04

Review: America’s “War on Terrorism” (Paperback)

4 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Terrorism & Jihad

Thoughtful Views on US/CIA as the Threat, Totalitarianism Emergent,

May 6, 2006

Michel Chossudovsky

This is a helpful book, useful and pointed, that attempts to document, with some but not complete success, the charge that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were concocted threats spawned by the CIA and used by the Bush Administration to permit unilateral military operations aimed at capturing Central Asian and Iraqi energy resources.

The author has clearly done a great deal of research and independent thinking, but the book would have benefited considerably from an intergration of the timelines and other thoughts to be found in such excellent works as “Crossing the Rubicon,” “Resource Wars” etcetera.

The author's central thesis is that we are moving toward a totalitarians new world order in which war, police repression, and predatory economic policies are integrated and interface with one another to create a privileged wealth class, and impoverish the rest of the world including the American and Canadian middle classes. It merits comment that the author's primary scholarly accomplishments are in the economic arena, and this book is appreciated more if one also reads his “The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order.”

The author points out something I did NOT know from my other 700 books as reviewed here at Amazon: that Bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital on 10-11 September. This coincides with other authors who have suggested that 9-11 was originally intended to be a nuclear event, and was, by agreement between the Bush Administration and the Pakistani government, “downgraded” to a controlled hijacking.

The author is courageous and on point when he suggests that we now have war criminals in office who have the temerity to decide who is a terrorist and who is a criminal. As the author's work implies, Dick Cheney is right up there with Henry Kissinger in terms of actions against international law that could warrant his being extradicted to stand trial before the Tribunal.

The author also makes useful points–in harmony with other authors now emergent–to the effect that the drug crop in Afghanistan is essential to Wall Street and the international banks, and is fully the equal of oil trade in its importance to international speculators and economic power brokers.

There are some disconcerting errors within the book, for example, the author states that the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is $30 billion a year, when anyone who follows the U.S. Intelligence Community knows that this was at the time the TOTAL budget for all the secret agencies, with CIA receiving roughly one tenth of the total. Today the budget is close to $60 billion, CIA is a disaster area, and America is no safer.

Overall the author focuses primarily on the CIA as the source of all evil, and completely neglects both the FBI, whose incompetence or collaboration were essential to both World Trade Center attacks (the car bomb, and then the airplane attacks), and he also tends to neglect, for lack of understanding, any mention of the Saudi Arabian private intelligence network that displaced CIA long ago, as well as the private global murder network (see my review of Joseph Trento, “Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA.”

There is a very clear pattern emerging in the broader literature that suggests that the Bush Administration is impeachable, and that the Clinton Administration before it is also impeachable, for a deliberate neglect of reasoned energy policy, and a deliberate nurturing of economic policies that enrich a few at the expense of both the home country middle class, and the billions around the world who are being driven to terrorism and insurgency by predatory immoral practices pursued by the U.S. Government in partnership with selected multinational corporations, many of which are fronts for importing impoverished illegal workers to the US, and destructively under-priced Chinese goods to the US marketplace–goods that destroy the local ecnomies.

I will end with a complement to the author: he offers and interesting combination of Chomsky and Sachs, a balance between deep critical commentary and deep scholarship. He speaks truth to power. His work merits our attention.

2006/05/022009/12/04

Review: Failed States–The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project) (Hardcover)

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power

Preventive Wars Don't Work; Democracy Deficit in USA,

May 2, 2006

Noam Chomsky

Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.

Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:

* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.

* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!

* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands–precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.

* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.

* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is “at war” is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more–as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the “foreign fighters” in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.

* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia–and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields–in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.

* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.

* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of “demonic messiaism” and rely on “the big lie” that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.

* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the “democratic deficit” in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and — in the case of John McCain — born again Bushophiles.

This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.

I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
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

2006/04/042009/12/04

Review: A Farewell to Justice–Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Hardcover)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Sufficient to Impeach the Warren Commission; CIA Now Proven Complicit,

April 4, 2006

Joan Mellen

Edit of 11 Dec 07: Since I wrote this review, another book has come out, Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History and it conclusively documents two points:

1) JFK was assassinated by a Cuban exile team trained by CIA to assassinate Castro, that used their training against JFK, ostensibly for the Bay of Pigs mess. CIA then covered this up.

2) JFK was warned by Bobby that there were strong indications of a plot to kill him, and JFK himself blew it off, entrusting his safety to a Secret Service with no idea a professional CIA hit team was coming in.

As a former clandestine case officer for the CIA who served in Latin America and also lived in Viet-Nam during the ten coups, one of which killed Ngo Dinh Diem, I picked this book up with some trepidation.

It is an exhausting review, a truly incredible accomplishment for a single human being without any visible corporate resources for doing machine processing or visualization of all of the information.

Here's my bottom line as a 54-year old with over 30 years government service:

1) The Warren Commission, like the 9-11 Commission, blew it and mis-served the nation. They are retrospectively impeachable for dereliction of duty.

2) The Central Intelligence Agency, and Ted Shackley in particular, have a lot to answer for, and continue to lie and withhold key documents from the American people. We need the moral equivalent of a truth & reconciliation commission on covert action–I thought the Church Commission had done some of that, but clearly there is more to be done.

3) We clearly do not have a government that is capable of being consistently honest, at the same time that we have thousands of dedicated government employees who have no idea what the “cowboys” are doing. The recent outrage over CIA renditions and torture are all too familiar for those who have studied the Phoenix assassination program in Viet-Nam, or the JMWAVE efforts against Castro that blew back against John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy.

4) The time has come for the people to arm themselves with open source intelligence. I want to cut the spines off all these books that are creating new revelations and new detail, put it all in a machine, and makes some sense out of it. We are a few years away from that point, but the day is coming, and when that day comes, we need to hand down some public indictments, including posthumous indictments, and begin to set the stage for honorable governance and ethical intelligence.

This book may not be completely accurate–it tends to assume the worst of CIA at all points–but it is assuredly enough to persuade me that US intelligence has much to answer for, and the Warren Commission *should* be retrospectively impeached.

For those who under-estimate the value of history, see Robert Parry on Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'(Ted Shackley played a big role there as well, allegedly running guns to Central America, drugs back through America to Europe, and cash from Europe home), and also the complaints of the official Department of State historians, who are outraged that the CIA will still not release documents from the 1960's without which we cannot properly evaluate our foreign policy misadventures in retrospect.

2006/03/172009/12/04

Review: Strategery–How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media (Hardcover)

3 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics, Strategy

Useful Apologia, Disingenious and Misleading,

March 17, 2006

Bill Sammon

This book is a useful apologia for the President, and provides a superb context for understanding how the extreme right can see their man as “doing no wrong.”

This book is, however, shockingly hateful and disrespectful of those who seek out the truth of any matter. I was absolutely stunned to see the manner in which this author treats the initiative of the reporter and the integrity of our Armed Forces person who in combination gave our nation the photos of the Abu Gharaib attrocities.

This book is inflammatory, delusional, and glib. The author labels Seymour Hersh, one of the most extraordinary and accomplished investigative reporters in American history, as a “leftwing polemicist.” Perhaps the author did not like it when it was Hersh who revealed that Rumsfeld gave the order allowing the Pakistani's to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda personnel from the Tora Bora trap. This author probably thinks the CIA officers who went into Afghanistan in advance of our troops (“First In,” and “JAWBREAKER”) were left wing pinkos for not being happy when the military refused to close the trap and let Bin Laden and key aides walk out to Pakistan after being tracked on the ground for four days.

The author repeats known falsehoods, such as Bush saying that no one in government ever envisoned anyone flying airplanes into buildings, when anyone who reads knows that this is precisely what was envisioned in the Hart-Rudman report over a year earlier. Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina, and Bush saying no one told him, and presto, a video is leaked of someone doing precisely that.

If you are an extreme rightist, you will love this book. If you are a moderate Republican (as am I), an Independent, Green, Libertarian, conservative Democrat, or moderately well read, there is one reason and one reason only to buy this book: to completely understand the depth and breadth of the ideological fantasy land that these extremists inhabit.