Category: Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Posted on

Review: Operation Dark Heart–Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and the Path to Victory

5 Star, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars USG Blows It, Makes This a Best-Seller

October 5, 2010

Anthony Shaffer

EDIT of 7 October 2010 to address the negatives.

I can see I need to spell this out more clearly.

1) Let's distinguish between the book and the heavy-handed (late) censorsorship. The book is an earnest personal effort by an experienced officer who knows what he is talking about. The book as now published does NOT violate even the late heavy-handed censorship. I consider the book to be an excellent overview of where US intelligence and special operations are today, along with General Mike Flynn's powerful critique “Fixing Intel-A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” (free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog).

2) Now on to the officer's loss of clearances and heavy-handed censorship.

2a) First, his loss of clearances was ABUSIVE, unwarranted, and totally reflective of the pathological operational decrepitude of our entire clearance system. I am not speaking of those who administer the system, they do the best we can. I am speaking of Colonels and Flag Officers who abuse the system to punish and silence and bankrupt–this is a form of political assassination akin to CIA's “Fitness for Duty” physicals that seek to declare any person with ethics unwilling to go along with insane or unconstitutional practices to be “crazy” and unemployable.

2b) Secondly, the book was CLEARED for publication, it is only after the fact that someone (if I had to speculate, I would guess General Ron Burgess, Director of DIA) decided that the book might make them look bad and sought desperately and foolishly to find a way to get it off the market. One of the real problems we have in our Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information world is that it turns intelligent adults into morons (Daniel Elsberg said this to Kissinger, I am just borrowing it). They actually end up with the delusion that they can “control” anything by making it secret.

The US is hosed strategically, financially, operationally, politically, and ethically. What we “do” at vast expense to the now bankrupt Treasury that has wasted over 14 trillion on the bank bail-out and over 4 trillion on an out of control Pentagon that can no longer build ships or airplanes or even provide squads with effective personal weapons or immediate area surveillance devices, is not in the public interest. Poverty has skyrocketed under this Administration precisely because it continued the previous Administrations two wars, both wars justified to the public by 935 lies led by Dick Cheney while Colin Powell stood silent.

This book is valuable, it merits five stars on its own, and now that Pentagon and CIA clumsiness have made a free online side by side version of the book available, one side as written, the other as redacted, the public has the added advantage of being able to see with great precision that 90% of the redactions are idiotic and have nothing to do with national security anything–precisely the kind of ineptitude that 90% of our expensive and unwarranted secrecy seeks to cover up across the $75 billion (going on $90 billion) secret intelligence archipelago.

I have not deleted the review and welcome the negative votes as a reminder to myself that we have differing views and that many do not see the world as I see it based on my very broad experience and very broad reading patterns. I am loyal to the Republic, to the Constitution, and to the idea that is America. Much of what we do today is inconsistent with the Constitution and the idea that is America. This book is a checkpoint in our road back to being in a state of grace with our Founding Fathers. IMHO.

Below I list five links that complement this book's offering.
Surrender to Kindness (One Man's Epic Journey for Love and Peace)
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, in support of my latest book (free online there but better if bought in hard copy here at Amazon: INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, I have two massive free lists of lists, the first everything that is wrong with America (according to other authors); the second everything that could be right with America (according to other authors). I am but a bridge to the thinking of others, and I commend to everyone's attention, these lists.

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

Bless you all–too many of you think of the author of this book, and of me, as being part of the enemy force. Not so. We are the good guys who have been left wounded on the battlefield by comrades who should have known better. Neither the chain or command nor careerism are worth dying for, but today our brave troops are dying for precisely that: ideologically and politically justified decisions divorced from reality; and flag officers prostituting themselves to careerism and not doing what I as a young lieutenant knew was my job: protecting my troops from other officers and their bad judgments.

Semper Fidelis,
Robert Steele
Maj USMCR (Ret)

Free Side by Side Version Online

Vote and/or Comment on Review
Posted on

Review/Reference: Black World Books by Trevor Paglen

5 Star, Geography & Mapping, History, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Amazon Page

Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen's long-awaited first photographic monograph. Social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies–the “black world”–for the last eight years, publishing, speaking and making astonishing photographs. As an artist, Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.

Amazon Page

Blank Spots: According to Trevor Paglen, a geographer by trade, this black world can bounded by adroit compilation of blank areas on official maps, deleted passages from official documents, and acute observations of restricted areas and activities. Well he has certainly done a very thorough job of it. He begins with the secret and unacknowledged government test sites scattered throughout the country, but especially in the South Western U.S. that actually employ an astonishingly large number military and civilian workers yet still are literarily off the map. He subsequently tackles such arcane topics as black operations, black funding, and a host of other unacknowledged, often denied, U.S. activities including questionable and even illegal programs and operations. Perhaps the most discouraging information he provides is how easily it is for officials of the black world to hoodwink congress and the media, both nominal guards against government excesses. Certainly the most astonishing thing he reveals is that the black world in total may employ as many as 4 million military and civilians who carry secret or higher clearances. The fact that this many people can be involved and yet so many black activities remain completely off the gird is pretty scary in itself.   This reviewer has tremendous respect for the academic discipline of geography. It combines some of the best features of social and physical science and perhaps is the most effective system for understanding the phenomenon of Globalization. Some 60 years ago one branch of geography that was called “cultural geography” sought to describe the relationship between societies and the environment in which they lived. The term may no longer be used, but Paglen is a cultural geographer in the best sense of the term.  [Retired Reader]

Amazon Page

I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World

Shown here for the first time, these sixty patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches—which are worn by military units working on classified missions—are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known.

By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume one of the best available surveys of the military’s black world—a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

Amazon Page

Since 9/11, the CIA has quietly kidnapped more than a hundred people and detained them at prisons throughout the world. It is called ”extraordinary rendition,” and it is part of the largest U.S. clandestine operation since the end of the Cold War.

They find that nearly five years after 9/11, the kidnappings have not stopped. On the contrary, the rendition program has been formalized, colluding with the military when necessary, and constantly changing its cover to remain hidden from sight.

“Shows just how far two guys without any highplaced government contacts can go in blowing open a story of global import.” — The San Francisco Chronicle

“The cool, almost dispassionate tone…. makes their book all the more disturbing.” — The Washington Examiner

“The logistics of torture, and the public's role in the brutal business…. the book excels at filling in blanks.” — TIME OUT Chicago

“The real thing… and not on the evening news. Go figure.” — New York Times

Posted on

Review (Guest): The Shell Game (Fiction/Non-Fiction)

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Future, Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

Phi Beta Iota: Rarely, if ever, do we find a book reviewed by someone we know, and in this instance, two someone's we know.  It is for that reason we are ranking the book as 6 Star and Beyond.

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Frightening Book of the Decade – Genius!, January 24, 2008
By Michael C. Ruppert – See all my reviews

Steve Alten clearly states that many of the factual threads running throughout “The Shell Game” were based upon the extensive research found in my book, “Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil”. I actually didn't know about Shell Game until after it had been written, when Steve offered to send me a review copy. I am so glad he did.

My book is 600 pages of non-fiction with a thousand footnotes. It is in the Harvard Business School Library.

Steve's book is a gripping, fire-breathing, page-turning novel that the great Robert Ludlum would envy. Both books convey exactly the same message: that the world is running out of oil fast; that human civilization hangs in the balance; and that the US government used this crisis as a rationale for perpetrating the attacks of 9-11 and (very likely) attacks yet to come.

Why? The American people would never allow their sons and daughters to be used and sacrificed as bloody oil conquistadors unless we could call ourselves victims.– We are victims, but not that kind.

Steve's absolute genius is in his ability to make the unpalatable irresistible. It lies also in his ability to separate research “ice cream” from research “bs”. “Children”, hucksters and some with more sinister motives have hijacked the so-called 9-11 “truth movement.” That clear thinking is what makes “The Shell Game” slice through consciousness and reach the soul like a hot scalpel through butter. Steve takes us into a terrifying future as though he were reading a military GPS locator.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Shell Game (Fiction/Non-Fiction)”

Posted on

Review (DVD): Restrepo

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Force Structure (Military), Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Reviews (DVD Only), Science & Politics of Science, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong Recommendation from MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret)

September 27, 2010

  • Actors: Dan Kearney, Lamonta Caldwell, Kevin Rice, Misha C. Pemble-Belkin, Kyle Steiner
  • Directors: Sebastian Junger;Tim Hetherington

    • General (and PhD) Robert Scales strongly recommended this movie to an audience at the Brookings Institute today. He used it as a backdrop to his official remarks on how 4% of the total force (the engaged infantry) suffers 80% of the total casualties, but less than 1% of the total Pentagon budget is spent on training and equipping them.

    My trip report on his remarks is at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, search for <Robert Scales> without the brackets.

    General Scales is the author of three books, one of which I have reviewed that remains a classic, on the disconnect between the needs of the infantry and the pie in the sky $75 billion US national intelligence community that prefers to build expensive satellites that do not work and whose collection cannot be processed.

    Firepower in Limited War: Revised Edition
    Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America's Military
    The Iraq War: A Military History

    To understand the continued corruption in US military management, see also:
    War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
    Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch
    The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World

    Vote and/or Comment on Review
    Posted on

    Review: People of the Central Intelligence Agency–Francis Gary Powers, Tscherim Soobzokov, Bob Barr, William F. Buckley, Jr., Valerie Plame [Paperback]

    4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
    Amazon Page

    4.0 out of 5 stars Online Distillation?

    September 11, 2010

    No listed author

    I am in this book, but that is not saying a great deal since I came out from under cover with permission after Alvin Toffler built the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” around me, in War and Anti-War: Making Sense of Today's Global Chaos.

    Based on the lack of authorship, details, and the kludge of names, I was tempted to give this a three but went to a four solely because it is probably a good illustration of the range of information about CIA officers that is online today AND the price is sensational. This is a very fairly priced book, and for that alone I do recommend its purchase.

    Continue reading “Review: People of the Central Intelligence Agency–Francis Gary Powers, Tscherim Soobzokov, Bob Barr, William F. Buckley, Jr., Valerie Plame [Paperback]”

    Posted on

    Review (Preliminary): Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World

    6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Officers Call, Public Administration, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
    Amazon Page

    6 Star Plus, a Foundation Work

    11 August 2010

    Dr. Kent C. Myers et al

    In combination with the other books that I am reading this week, the first by David Perkins, Making Learning Whole, the second by Curtis Bonk, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, this book I have read in galley form, by Dr. Kent C. Myers [strategist and process historian, a disciple of Russell L. Ackoff] with contributed chapters from a number of other  individuals, gives me hope.  This is an extraordinarily diplomatic and measured book, a book that can nudge even the most recalcitrant of know-it-all stake-holders toward the “aha” experience that what they are doing [doing the wrong things righter] is NOT WORKING  and maybe, just maybe, they should try Reflexive Practice (or at least begin to hire people that think this way).  This is *the* book that could-should lead to the first-ever Secretary General of Education, Intelligence, & Research….IMHO.  The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, done with Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) was a proponency book.  This book by Dr. Myers et al is a praxis book absolutely up there with the other 6 Star and beyond books that I recommend.  As soon as I receive a printed copy, I will publish a detailed review.

    AMAZON HAS THE BOOK ON SALE, $30 off from the list price of $95.  As opposed as I am to the doubling of book prices, this is one book that is easily worth $65, and it is the one book I will be interested in discussing with all comers when I return to NCA in September.

    Blurbs at Amazon

    “An important book which illuminates, with practical and readable lessons, the path to top performance.”—Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

    “A quiet but powerful critique of professions and professional education, with a glimpse of how experts could participate in open and engaged dialogue and actually help us adapt our way through today's crisis.” —Carol R. Hunter, Associate University Librarian, University of Virginia

    Publisher's Product Description

    Continue reading “Review (Preliminary): Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World”

    Posted on

    Review: The Shadow Factory–The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

    5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Privacy

    Amazon Page

    Author's Two Points: NSA as Enabler of Tyranny, Channel for Israel, October 19, 2008

    James Bamford

    10 Aug 10 PBI Edit to add Amazon link and Review link.

    The book is a devastating complement to A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. See also (or at least read reviews) his earlier books about NSA, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.

    The author tells us that NSA red flag went up on 21 June. 30 distinct warnings within NSA in June-July; 6 August was the 36th time Bin Laden briefed to President, and blown off; by 21 August FBI and CIA both knew two terrorists were in the USA–FBI assigned to a rookie who ignored it for a week and then mistakenly marked as a witness wanted, not as a terrorist armed and dangerous.

    911 Commission did not visit NSA or ask NSA questions–neither the Commissioners nor the staff understood NSA or how it contributed to 911

    New insights into the culture of lethargy and inter-agency competition, with details on multiple failures by CIA, NSA, and FBI–NSA had location in California but did not bother to look up area codes; CIA knew two were in US but would not tell FBI; CIA did not inform State, INS issued asylum without checking false name.

    Continue reading “Review: The Shadow Factory–The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America”

    noble gold