Now the world is noticing. He appeared on Russia Today TV, which has eclipsed BBC as the English-language trusted source (and also excels at migrating its TV shorts to the web and to print), and here are some of his own words that illuminate how important his book is:
He says:
The ultimate goal of the US is to take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block economic growth in China and Russia, thus taking the whole of Eurasia under control, author and historian William F. Engdahl reveals.
The crisis with the US economy and the dollar system, the conduct of the US foreign policy is all a part of breakdown of the entire superpower structure that was built up after the end of WWII, claims Engdahl.
“Nobody in Washington wants to admit, just as nobody in Britain a hundred years ago wanted to admit that the British Empire was in terminal decline,” claims the author, noting that “All of this is related to the attempt to keep this sole superpower not only intact, but to spread its influence over the rest of the planet.”
William F. Engdahl believes the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is a plan first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called “The Greater Middle East Project”.
The US Government is out of control, and it is out of control because a two-party tyranny (less turnover than the Politburo, in Peggy Noonan's great line for use by Ronald Reagan) has nurtured a combination of Wall Street legalized greed and neo-con military-industrial complex that has sold out the US taxpayer — 5% earmarks “buy” a 95% corporate hand-out, one third of that money borrowed in our name.
Occupy Wall Street is incoherent right now – when they get their act together, it is my hope they will focus on an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 – in my view, there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful — all these enormous crimes against humanity not-withstanding – that cannot be fixed quickly by restoring integrity to our electoral system, hence our govenrment, hence our society and economy.
“Shaxson’s story of offshore banking is nothing short of Shakespearean, a drama full of secrecy, treachery and corruption in which wealthy countries, companies and individuals collude to horde wealth in a complex global network of largely unregulated tax havens. To realize this end, they install corrupt leaders, exploit indigenous populations and, ultimately, deny both developed and developing nations of vital tax dollars. There is much here that should generate outrage…An admirable job of both arguing the consequences of offshore banking and providing a succinct history of the practice.”–Kirkus
“A blistering account of the role that tax havens play in international finance. . . brilliant.”—London Review of Books
“Far more than an exposé, Treasure Islands is a brilliantly illuminating, forensic analysis of where economic power really lies, and the shockingly corrupt way in which it behaves. If you're wondering how ordinary people ended up paying for a crisis caused by the reckless greed of the banking industry, this compellingly readable book provides the answers.”–David Wearing, School of Public Policy, UCL, London’s Global University
“The real challenge to America’s economy comes not from China – but from the Caymans, the Bahamas, and a whole hot-money archipelago loosely under the control of the City of London. If only as a civics lesson, read this astonishing book to find out the true political constitution of the world.”– Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
With eye opening revelations, Treasure Islandsexposes the culprits and its victims, and shows how:
*Over half of world trade is routed through tax havens
*The rampant practices that precipitated the latest financial crisis can be traced back to Wall Street’s offshoring practices
*For every dollar of aid we send to developing countries, ten dollars leave again by the backdoor
5.0 out of 5 stars Priceless Content Tediously Presented – Merits a Big House Re-Issue, SEE YOUTUBE!, October 15, 2011
Bottom line: there is an enormous amount of priceless information in the book that is the equal of Abu Ghraib but against an American citizen who was by all evidence a source if not an agent for a non-official cover officer of the CIA based in the DC area. From being ignored to being locked up without any due process to being declared mentally incompetent by people lacking all integrity to being held without trial for years, the mind just boggles. What especially troubled me was the degree to which the prisons the author was exposed to used drugs to turn prisoners who refused to confess into drug-stupored vegetables.
I remove one star because this book has not been fully developed and the author as well as all associated with the book have failed to present compelling visualizations, a timeline, snapshot biographies of the key players, etcetera. I strongly believe that this book should be reissued by a major house, with a major foreword, and tied to the Occupy Wall Street concerns about institutionalized corruption.
I RESTORE the star to a full five because the YouTube videos featuring the author are nothing short of sensational. Together with the short film Hypocrisy, this could be the “story” that breaks the back of the Empire. The author is engaging and authentic in her video appearances, I do not believe any American can understand the deep corruption in the US Government without absorbing what she has to share.
The book is TEDIOUS. It is a stream of consciousness account by the author leavened with direct quotations from testimony. If it were not so tedious it would make my blood boil with outrage, but sadly, for such an important story, what we have here is just over 450 pages of run-on text including appendices with copies of some documents and depositions.
From where I sit as a former spy who has also done counterintelligence, published books on intelligence, and generally been the leading critic of fraud, waste, and abuse in the secret intelligence and counterintelligence worlds, the following stay with me from this book:
1 CIA is using non-official cover officers to run operations within and against the Congress. Congressional staffers are both targets and sources, some may be agents (paid).
2 The author clearly had advance warning of 9/11 and communicated that warning to the intelligence community (I have written elsewhere of how nine nations warned us in advance, the FBI blew off two walk-ins in Orlando and Newark, Dick Cheney scheduled the national counter-terrorism exercise for “the day” three months in advance, etc etc.
3 Where the book excels and is easily a five star book if the publisher had shown more creative commitment, is in documenting the lengths to which the government will go to lie, cheat, and otherwise abuse the Constitution, individual citizens, and the public at large. This book is an indictment of the Department of Justice (which we have recently learned claims the right to lie to the Court when it and it alone thinks it appropriate), the FBI, the CIA, and the White House consider it useful, which turns out to be most of the time.
4 The “wild card” in this story is Andrew Card, then Chief of Staff at the White House, and a direct family relation of the author. The smoking gun in this book is its documented evidence that the White House knew full well that 9/11 was coming, and leveraged that event, overlooking the 3,000 murdered (most of them in my view by controlled demolitions planted by Larry Silverstein in a massive insurance scam that was convenient to both the political government and to Wall Street (destroying all SEC files in WTC 7, never hit by anything).
I am not at all sure why the author did not get murdered while in prison with an overdose of whatever drug of choice they use these days. I have often reflected on the schizophenic nature of some of my colleagues, honorable people who try to do their best, while also playing drone or gerbil to out and out war criminals like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name just three.
I recommend readers buy the book, and also search for various web options including her April 2001 YouTube (1:36:12), and the book's website. My counsel to the author would be to post the book immediately online in full text by the chapter for ease of automated translation by Google Translate. Certainly I would be glad to do that at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. What this book desperately needs is the application of “cognitive surplus” such that timelines, visualizations, and other value-added sense-making can be integrated. I'd like to see a sharp two page executive summary of findings and implications.
We now know that Obama feared a coup if he prosecuted CIA officials and others including political appointees for their various high crimes and misdemeanors, and while this is understandable, it does not negate the need to return the US Government to the rule of law, a rule that has been so flagrantly violated so many times more under Obama than under Bush. I write this review in the aftermath of the first ever PUBLICIZED murder of a US citizen by drone without due process. We now know that the President (Obama) and the national security apparatchiks (led by Goldman Sachs lobbyist in the role of National Security Advisor) claim the right to kill anyone anywhere, including Americans, if they are deemed to be a threat to national security, where national security is left open-ended and can include any threat to the First Lady's vegetable garden. That pretty much makes all 99% of us a threat.
I salute the author, and the publisher, for getting the book out, and below list some other books that are advancing our understanding of the depraved nature of the US Government as now owned and controlled by Wall Street through the two-party tyranny (there are 65 parties in the USA, only two gets to loot the US Treasury at will, taking 5% political payoffs for taxpayer-funded programs).
Certainly I hope that the author prospers and that over time she and the authors of the books below are recognized as righteous and more in harmony with the Constitution than the executive or legislative branches of the US Government are today.
Of the many books I've read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin's Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process. — Jonathan Crary, Artforum
4.0 out of 5 stars Managed Democracy, Superpower, and alas, even, “Inverted Totalitarianism”, June 17, 2008
This is a seminal work which “tells it like it is” concerning the current power arrangements in the American political system, as well as the political leadership's aspirations towards global empire. Prof. Wolin sets the tone of his work on page 1, with the juxtaposition of the imagery of Adolph Hitler landing in a small plane at the 1934 rally at Nuremberg, as shown in Leni Reifenstahl's “Triumph of the Will,” and George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” in 2003. Certainly one of the dominant themes of the book is comparing the operating power structure in the United States with various totalitarian regimes of the past: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Prof Wolin emphasizes the differences between these totalitarian powers, and the softer concentration of power in the United States, which he dubs “inverted totalitarianism.”
In the U.S., the relationship between strategic intelligence and the formulation of national security policies has been to say the least complex and often confusing. This book provides what has long been needed, an objective and scholarly review of this relationship.
Rovner provides an excellent theoretical background to guide his examination of specific case histories that he has chosen to illustrate the relationships between strategic intelligence and policy. Ideally intelligence analysts should be able to operate without interference to produce strategic intelligence reports that are honest, objective, and supported by the best information available. Again ideally policy makers should be free to challenge such reports. Finally both analysts and policymakers should be able to hold rational discussions over differences in interpretation and conclusions in which the supporting evidence is considered objectively. Unfortunately this ideal is often thwarted by what Rovner calls “the pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.” He has identified three such `pathologies':
5.0 out of 5 stars Six Star Epilogue, the Capstone Work, September 26, 2011
I have been a fan of Ralph Peters for over fifteen years now, going back to the early 1990's when the US Marine Corps was trying to get the Secretary of Defense (then Dick Cheney) to focus on most likely vice worst case threats. Having been the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, and the Study Director for the flagship study, Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, I recognized both his deep integrity and his broad intelligence, both so uncharacteristic of the near-venal to all-banal US secret intelligence community that I had served since 1976.
This is his capstone work. Below are a few of his most notable recent works, there are many others, and I also recommend his Owen Parry series on the Civil War. If you only get one book by Ralph Peters, this is the one to buy.
2012 in my view is a turning point year for America, and I pray that it is the year that citizens with integrity kick politicians without integrity (all of them) out of office and get a clean sheet fresh start in recreating a government of, by, and for We the People instead of what we have now, what Matt Taibbi describes so well in Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, “a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government.”
Phi Beta Iota: The jury is still out, and the issue of whether Cuban exiles supported by CIA including forged Secret Service credentials, or Dallas mob contract killers, or both, were “prime,” remains to be settled. However, the nature of Oswald as a patsy, and the contrived “evidence” from Russia and Mexico, suggest a very important role for selected CIA leaders (not necessarily the institution) in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This flurry of books could have an interesting effect on the presidential candidacy of Governor Perry, leading to his character assassination by association….whether deserved or not, it is clear Texas as a culture has some truth and reconciliation in its future. It merits comment that JFK was warned by his brother that assassination leads had been picked up and JFK himself chose to ignore those warnings and expose himself in his enemy's lair. In our view, the JFK and MLK assassinations embolded the “rule by secrecy” white collar crime families, and turned every subsequent President into a pawn to be used against We the People in favor of the financial crime families. If Governor Perry gets a major financial bounce–including the same $300 million in undeclared (illegal) contributions that Obama got and did not account for, he can be regarded as the heir apparent to the farce we call democracy.
