4.0 out of 5 stars 6 on Republicans, 3 on Democrats, 0 on the Other 50% of America's Voters,August 12, 2012
I read this book is in original incarnation, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” (truthout, 3 Sep 2011), and have to give the author high marks for fleshing out his original litany of Republican felonies against the public. For that he gets a 6 — beyond five stars and long overdue. He is especially strong on showing how hypocritical, unintelligent, and generally unethical my former party has become. He barely earns a 3 on the Democrats, and this is a pity because his success on the Republicans really calls for a similar indictment for the Democrats by an insider.
Where I was most dismayed by the book is in the author's complete failure to grasp that the REASON the Republican and Democratic parties are so corrupt is precisely because they have excluded the Independents, Constitutionals, Greens, Libertarians, and Reforms from ballot access, while also disenfranchising them through gerrymandering–our corrupt Congress chooses its voters, not the other way around, which is why Peggy Noonan was able to supply Ronald Reagan with the killer saying, “there is less turnover in the US Congress than in the Soviet politburo.”
I've read the other reviews and decided the best thing I can do to encourage the general direction of this book (corrupt parties, corrupt government, time to flush) is list other books I have reviewed that strongly support this one but with more coherence in their chosen area of focus.
If there's a single Founding Father of the Open Source movement, Robert D. Steele is it. Everyone else has been playing catchup. And if you don't know what the Open Source revolution is, you need to read this book. You don't even need to know why! You need to buy it, read it, and then you'll *know* why. No other book on Open Source can open your eyes the way this one can. That's because there's no potential use of Open Source intelligence that Steele hasn't anticipated. Collective Intelligence is coming! It's an unstoppable force. And it will change everything. So if you like to know about things like that in advance, you need to buy this book.
The information age that was created by personal computers was just a kiddie car with a squeaky horn. By comparison, the open source revolution is a freight train. Its potential to change your world is orders of magnitude greater. This is not hyperbole. In fact superlatives can't begin to express the ground-shaking potential of this next wave of human evolution.
The Florida Sun Sentinel has for many years been rather unique, as a corporate newspaper with a regular columnist who's actually good, and I don't mean just good for the context, but actually worth reading even if the masses of South Florida weren't reading along. Happily, they are.
Stephen L. Goldstein has just published a book, also worth reading, called Atlas Drugged (Ayn Rand Be Damned!) It's fiction, often hilarious fiction, aimed at debunking the notion that Ayn Randian “free-market” trickle-down crapitalism can coexist with basic human decency. “This is a work of fiction,” says the back cover. “But any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely intentional. The names have been changed but, hopefully, not enough to protect the guilty.”
In fact, while the book takes rightwingerism to an extreme, it blends in plenty of elements from reality. Imagine the most outlandish carrying of so-called conservatism to its logical conclusion, and abandoning New Orleans to a hurricane, or watching a fire department stand by while a house burns (because the owner didn't pay the proper fees) fits right in.
3.0 out of 5 stars 5 as Personal Memoir, 1 for Nonsense About “Hard Measures”, May 3, 2012
As a memoir of time in the CIA bureaucracy and occasional righteous deeds in the field, the book is a must read along with a handful of others by former case offices of stature-no one denies the stature of the primary author-I do question the role of the second author. Unfortunately, the author himself may not realize the falseness of the context, the premises, the claims, the reports, and the ethics surrounding rendition and torture. All I can do is point this out and hope that readers will take the time to reflect and read beyond this book.
I am a former clandestine case officer from the Latin America Division, and among those from CIA, including former Director Stansfield Turner, case officers Robert Bauer and Vince Cannistraro, and many others, who signed the letter to Senator McCain against torture.
Real professionals, which is to say, not the Ollie North's of CIA, know that torture does not work. Anything in this book that says it does, and that leads came out of torture that were important, is in my independent judgement a lie-perhaps not a deliberate lie. The primary author was so far removed from the ground reality as to be unwitting of the lies being told to him by contractors and case officers who sought only to improve their “record” without regard to the truth or the consequences.
Anytime there is an argument over whether something is torture or not, it is. This will not be understood by the loosely-educated who lack an appreciation of ethics and the strategic value of morality.
Dick Cheney committed over 20 impeachable crimes (I itemize them in my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, while also telling 935 now documented lies. The primary value of this book may be in clearly identifying the author as an enabler of Dick Cheney's crimes and lies, and a subject for future investigation if the USA ever gets an honest government again.
The CIA is an empty shell, with child analysts and no bench in the clandestine service. This is one reason DIA is working so hard to create its own “Class A” clandestine service, but sadly, DIA is turning to the same low standards that CIA has had all these years, and will be hard pressed to get much beyond its present standard for clandestine operations, “push ups done silently.”
I love books and I love the truth. I have written, edited, and published nine books on intelligence so far, and believe with all humility that I am helping set the gold standard for what ethical intelligence could and should be. In my personal opinion, this book demeans everything that CIA, the US Government, the Constitution, and the Republic should stand for.
You can find almost all of my reviews on books about intelligence at one single consolidated list easily found by searching for the phrase below (all reviews lead to their respective Amazon page). Buy something other than this book — it shames us all and does no service to the craft of intelligence.
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)
Here are nine other books [Amazon has a ten link limit]-the first two show CIA at its best, the rest at its normal worst.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Starting Point for National Counterintelligence Outing of Zionist Traitors in US Government and Industry, April 29, 2012
I hate electronic books for many reasons, including being an old guy that still thinks in hand – eye – brain terms, so let me start by saying this is the first e-book that for me has been a pleasure to read. Plenty of white space, clearly separated chapter, a great inter-spersal of photographs, and finally — my most important touch point — really superb sources at the end of each chapter, with many of them actively linked.
As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, I read a lot — over 30 books (with a leavening of DVDs) on 9/11, but to put that in context, that is just 0.016 of my reading in the last decade. Do not for a moment think of me as a conspiracy theorist or anti-Semite. I am an intelligence professional, with integrity.
This particular book, unlike all the others I have read in relation to 9/11, does four things no other book has done:
01) Connects the dots of all the dual Israeli-US citizens in the US Government and US commercial circles (mostly in NYC) that were active participants in the 9/11 false flag operation. The role of the owners of the 81st floor and the massive bank of “batteries” that were never used but are precisely where the airlines hit, impressed me.
02) Integrates, for the first time, the history of Israeli false flag operations, the 1980 recognition by Israel that an attack on NYC and specifically against the tallest building in NYC whatever that might be, and the total complex context of 9/11 as both a catalyst for forcing the USA into a “war on terror” and a cover-up for the most massive financial crimes in history, including a special role for AIG and its specifically-identified Zionist leadership.
03) Introduces me for the first time to the facts about the Estonia that the Swedish government evidently covered up–it was carrying Russian contraband to Estonia, and two explosions blew off the front loading doors, dropping the ferry and 800 Swedes into a point almost halfway between Estonia and Sweden, as planned in a previous exercise. The author also covers NATO, the NATO presence that night, and the confounding combination of NATO being “asleep” the whole time, with the outage of the regional telephone networks for the duration.
04) Clarifies the depth of Israeli involvement in the drug trade — not just laundering the money in NYC and elsewhere, but actively nurturing the drug trade and drugs toward the US in particular — as a budget item. What comes out clearly is that Israel is not just bribing the US Congress, controlling the US White House, and castrating US intelligence and counterintelligence, but that Israel is using the USA as a two-track piggy bank — stealing all that it can from the US Treasury (Goldman Sachs provides the Secretary of the Treasury), while earning all that it can from running drugs into the US with the active collaboration of elements of the US Government and the Texas crime families including the Bush Cartel.
For some time I have been concerned about US false flag operations and corruption within the US government and US commercial circles. Although I have from time to time recognized that Israel treats the USA as a “shicksa” (as in gentile girls don't count, they are “fair game before and after marriage to a Jewish princess”), and I have been as outraged as any at the USS Liberty–the point at which I realized Israel is actually the enemy of the USA, a parasitic animal sucking the life out of the USA–I must say that this book moves me to place Israel and American citizens who are more loyal to Israel than to the Republic and the Constitution, in first place as the primary target for the emerging national counterintelligence network.
For years I have been talking about the need for religious counterintelligence. Originally I was concerned about Mormon penetration of the CIA and FBI, and with Mitt Romney being rumored to be the banker for at least one major drug cartel, one has to ask, when do we stop being an Idiot Nation? Then my focus shifted to Opus Dei, which has done quite well in US Navy circles and elsewhere. It is only in the past ten years, with the USS Liberty, the USS Cole (almost certainly another Israeli false flag operation), 9/11, and then a series of truly idiotic plots including the underpants bomber and the print cartridges on UPS, that I have realized that apart from political and appointed officials committing treason every day, Israel is the #1 enemy of the United States of America.
This is not anti-Semite. We are all Jewish in one way or another, and I have had the operation. This is about a Zionist cabal in Israel marrying up with the neo-con and rabid-Christian cabals in the USA, leveraging the global drug and arms trade to do evil to others all in the sake of saving Israel. The atrocities against the Palestinians, and the walls that out-do Hitler (there is one excellent picture of an Israeli wall with watchtower, three times higher than any prison wall), in combination with all that Israel and its embedded traitors have done to undermine the US and UK and to disgrace us all while stealing from us all, bring me to the line. ENOUGH.
I ran for President in the USA, accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate, for two reasons: 1) to put in one place (BigBatUSA.org) the four core ideas necessary if we are to restore the rule of law in the US; and 2) to be able to write to all other presidential candidates urging them to unite with Occupy, the Tea Party, Independents, and one another (six of the eight parties in the USA are treated as if they were shicksa Palestinians–of no account, access blocked) to restore the integrity of the electoral process, to create a coalition cabinet and a balanced budget, and to present America with a legal, ethical, non-violent revolutionary choice. I failed. From Ron Paul to Dennis Kucinich to Jill Stein, Buddy Roemer, Rocky Anderson–I reached all of them and all of them were, to the man, egotistical selfish deer in the headlights candidates, playing their own personal game with no thought of how to actually rescue America.
Zionist Israel (not Jews) is a cancer. I am glad to see the Arab dictatorships begin to fall, they are as responsible as Israel and the USA for the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel is hypocritical — it has cut deals with every dictator on the planet — as has the US — to its own ends. In a nutshell, the era of government Of, By, and For We the People is over. Governments have failed to maintain their integrity. We the People now need to create public intelligence in the public interest; to engage in massive non-violent tax revolts; and to begin using open source information to empower hybrid networks that route around corrupt governments, corrupt banks, corrupt media, corrupt universities, corrupt religions, corrupt labor unions–and reconstitution society from the bottom up. George Soros to his credit has finally recognized the Enlightenment Fallacy. I now recognize the Israeli Terror.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, halfway down the middle column, you can find a single link to all of my 9/11 reviews, all leading back to Amazon, but please do not stop there. I am the proponent for the third era of national intelligence, the era of Smart Nations, World Brain, Global Game, and connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time — only such a tsunami of public consciousness will overcome the evil that is done in our name and at our expense. I am optimistic.
Ghandhi and the Unspeakable looks upon the father of the Indian independence movement and examines why a prophet of nonviolence was assassinated by Hindu nationalists during a prayer meeting in New Delhi.
From James W. Douglass, the bestselling author of JFK and the Unspeakable (Orbis 2010), Ghandhi and the Unspeakable shines new light on the untimely death of Mohandas Gandhi. Following the theme of his study about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Douglass shows how the people who conspired to kill Gandhi hoped to destroy a compelling vision of peace, nonviolence and reconciliation.
By tracing the story of Gandhi's early “experiments with truth” in South Africa, Mr. Douglass shows how Gandhi confronted and overcame the fear of death. He also explains why, as with the case of JFK's death, this story matters today and what can be learned from Gandhi's truth and its opposition to the powers of his time.
Mr. Douglass is a scholar and peace activist. His book about the JFK assassination is widely acclaimed by historians and political scientists as one of the most important books written about the subject. Gandhi and the Unspeakable, according to Publisher's Weekly, “provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why.”
Co-authors Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell have been 20-year Wall Street insiders as partners in an executive search firm. Their book is a page-turning account of the 2007-8 meltdown and continuing unsolved issues that will inevitably lead to the next crises. Woven throughout their analysis are conversations with dozens of top executives from Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many hedge funds and private equity firms.
Only the executives' first names are used (for obvious reasons), which makes their recorded interviews with the authors more revealing, with all the vivid expletives un-redacted. We hear first-hand of how Wall Street's culture actually worked based on the “buyer beware” treatment of sophisticated clients. Pension funds were considered “big boys” who should do their own due diligence and against whom it was OK to bet that the securities sold to them would blow up. These were the market makers who, unlike the partnerships of yore, regularly took both sides of deals with their often unsuspecting customers while pushing ratings agencies to stamp these toxic products as triple-A. The prevailing culture is reflected in their language: “eat what you kill,” “ripping the face off” clients and the jungle rule of “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly associated with Charles Darwin rather than originally coined by Herbert Spencer, a British economist of that era who wrote for The Economist).
PREPARE TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN!,June 24, 2012
