Review: Secret History–The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal “Primary” Source Relevant Today
July 26, 2010

Nick Cullather

This is the original, Stanford has also just produced a new version, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952-1954. I bought this used and not only loved the speed of delivery, but the notes from the previous owner.

My next review will cover The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Trade. The two “successes” would both be condemned by history, but more pointedly, led to the CIA misadventures in Cuba, Chile, the Philippines, Viet-Nam, and so on.

There is a great deal in this book that I was not aware of, and that is with 294 reviews tagged Intelligence (Government/Secret)at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, all leading back to their Amazon page.

In a nutshell, PBSUCCESS was a stunningly inept widely known endeavor penetrated across multiple points by the Guatemalan government, which succeeded only because the Army lost its nerve and deposed their own elected President. Especially new to me were the US Navy blockage of the Guatemalan ports (one on each coast), and the failure of CIA-trained “saboteurs” to derail the shipment of arms from the port to the capital city that the President was able to procure despite a global US embargo on arms for Guatemala.

Continue reading “Review: Secret History–The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954”

Review: International Peace Observations

5 Star, Civil Affairs, Complexity & Resilience, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Force Structure (Military), Information Operations, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Seminal Work Cited by Dr. Walter Dorn
July 23, 2010
David Wainhouse

EDIT of 6 Sep 2010 to add comments on books once received.

I bought this book, a real bargain, at the suggestion of Dr. Walter Dorn, the “dean” of the peace intelligence scholars, who cites the book with great favor in his own forthcoming book, KEEPING WATCH: Monitoring and Technology in UN Peace Operations, which I am going through now in galley form.

Now that I am holding it in my hands, here are some comments.

1)  Published in 1966, it is a phenomenal, an utterly superb, historical review of League of Nations, Latin American Union, and UN peace observation missions from 1920 to 1965.  The book concludes with a major section on “Strengthening Peace Observations.”

2)  Right away I decide to donate this book to the George Mason University library without marking it up, nor am I reading it, having seen enough to understand why Professor Dorn recommends it so highly as a historical reference work.

3)  The book clearly needs a sequel, from 1966 to date, over 40 years of new conflicts and new peace missions, and I make mention of this hoping that someone reading this review will be inspired to take on the project with many collaborators.

Other related books I have reviewed:
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Perspectives on Intelligence History)
U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Satellite Industry: An Analysis of Risks
Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire (Cass Series on Peacekeeping, 5)
Public Information Campaigns in Peacekeeping : The UN Experience in Haiti

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Review (DVD): Unthinkable

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Government), Democracy, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Reviews (DVD Only), Secession & Nullification, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Survival & Sustainment, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle
Amazon Page

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Sheen Director: Gregor Jordan

And Carrie-Anne Moss (Amazon stinks at listing all authors and actors)

5.0 out of 5 stars

Astonishing–Riveting–Thought Provoking–Beyond Five Stars

May 28, 2010

EDIT of 27 August 2010: The Intelligence Science Board, the top advisory board to the Director of National Intelligence, has just come out with firm documented conclusions against coercive interviewing and absolutely demanding non-coercive interviewing. People like Col stuart Harrington and I have known this for decades, but it is nice to have the following (full links at Phi Beta Iota):

The ISB study notably dissected the “ticking time bomb” scenario that is often portrayed in television thrillers (and which has “captured the public imagination”). The authors patiently explained why that hypothetical scenario is not a sensible guide to interrogation policy or a justification for torture. Moral considerations aside, the ISB report said, coercive interrogation may produce unreliable results, foster increased resistance, and preclude the discovery of unsuspected intelligence information of value (pp. 40-42).

Bottom line: all of you that hate this review (shoot the messenger) have the best of intentions but you have absolutely no clue about real-life. Intelligence, not ideology, should be restoring America the Beautiful. That will not happen until We the People wake up and recognize that there is a two-party tryanny owned and operated by Wall Street, and we are being treated as expendable pigs.

Edit of 28 June 2010: the voting on this review appears to mirror the divide in America between left of center and right of center, with no dialog. I encourage a dialog in the comments section and will respond on a daily basis. The world is NOT “win-lose,” it is only “lose-lose” or “win-win” or what one author calls “Non-Zero.” We can either die as a species, or live as a species, there is no “eugenics” possible as much as Henry Kissinger (who can never return to France) might like the term. There is only one “we.” What we lack right now is educated leaders with open minds who have integrity. This topic–torture–and this review–against torture of Americans by Americans–and these votes–American against American–are a window into our soul and what I am seeing is no basis for happiness.

– – – – – – –

I am 57 years old, been a spy, did Viet-Nam (63-67) as the son of an oil man going through ten coups d'etat, did El Salvador where I was personally threatened with assassination by the guys running the country who did not like me talking to leftists, and so on. I am also one of the handful of Americans who signed the letter to Senator John “POWS in VN? What POWs” McCain against torture. The thousand five hundred non-fiction reviews I have done all serve as a foundation for saying that this movie is a MUST SEE for every American.

For some time now I have felt that the US Government is out of touch with the American public, out of touch with reality, and out of touch with ethics. Ethics is a really important word that has been central to my life these past twenty years as I along with a number of others have realized that most of what the US Government does in the way of both secret intelligence and global military operations is unethical, unprofessional, unrealistic, predatory, and generally a waste of the taxpayers' money.

This movie is not like Sum of All Fears or Live Free or Die Hard (Unrated Edition) or any of the other good guys win in the end movies. This movie focuses on our soul as seen in torture, and it very ably calls into question the idiocy of US foreign policy these past fifty years.

Continue reading “Review (DVD): Unthinkable”

Review (Guest): Government of the Shadows–Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (Paperback)

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

Review by Guido G. Preparata (Rome, Italy)

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and courageous social science

June 8, 2009

Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds)

In this recent volume by Pluto Press, Eric Wilson (Monash University) has assembled an all-stars team of politologists with the objective of changing the face of social analysis. This effort stems from the urgency to redefine the conceptual spaces within which we perforce corral our daily experience as citizens of what has become, in fact, an international polity of overwhelming, as well as highly disquieting, complexity. This is not at all to say, however, that the project limits itself to adding “epicycles,” as it were, to the Ptolemaic vulgate of British constitutionalism–i.e., the standard model of the “Liberal State”–which has imposed itself as the sole lens through which one is to contemplate the social dynamics for every single political reality of this world.

Government of the Shadows (GOS) represents in this regard an honest and brave swerve away from the mainstream in two fundamental respects.

First, it wishes to rethink political science entirely, by rejecting definitively the puritanical dichotomization of society into its predominant and “clean” edifice versus the latter's more or less corrupt “covert netherworld” (p. 228)–the prescriptive implication of conventional analysis being that delinquents need only be jailed, and their activities repressed, as the given regime is in the meantime steered (hopefully) toward the eventual and complete assimilation of Liberal institutions, which will naturally cure it of the criminal deviancy.

Second, and no less important, this project seeks to re-endow the movement for social justice of a unity of intent and of thought, which has lately been shattered by an excessive methodological preoccupation with multiplicity and diversity. By denouncing with reason and cogency the inequities suffered by a majority of innocents–throughout our recent history and all over the world–at the hands of identifiable, responsible parties within the power apparatuses in connivance with the world's mafias, and by ordering all such phenomenological mass into theory, this book, as a collective endeavor, acts as a vigorous reminder that realistic sociological analysis is also very much an instrument of pacific dissent. In this sense, GOS stands as a first and decisive installment of a modern anti-oligarchic theory.

To compass the reality of modern power games in its full spectrum, GOS innovates by proposing the new discipline of “parapolitics,” defined in Robert Cribb's introductory as “the study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way” (p. 8).

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Government of the Shadows–Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (Paperback)”

Review: Endless War–Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Geography & Mapping, History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, War & Face of Battle

27 March 2010: Full spread sheet and optimal links added below Amazon review.GOT TO RUN, Links later today.

Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Five Stars…Gifted Mix of Intelligence, Integrity, Insight Deeply Rooted in History and Firmly Focused on Today's Reality

March 21, 2010

Ralph Peters

I do not always agree with Ralph Peters, but along with Steve Metz and Max Manwaring, both at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army, I consider him one of America's most gifted strategists whose integrity is absolute. He simplifies sometimes (e.g. Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda because of the demand for marriage that was refused followed by the bloodbath execution of the family by Al Qaeda, not because of anything the US did) but that aside, Ralph is the ONLY person that reminds me of both Winston Churchill–poetry and gifted turns of phrase on every page–and Will Durant, historian extraordinaire. Ralph has a better grasp of history, terrain, and the military than Robert Kaplan, and deeper insights into our failed military leadership (no longer leaders, just politically-correct administrators out of touch with reality) than my favorite journalist-adventurer, Robert Young Pelton.

I have read and reviewed most of Ralph's books, and am proud to consider him a colleague and a fellow Virginian. Ralph is the only author whose books jump to the top of my “to read” pile, and I absorbed this masterpiece over the course of moving my own flag from Virginia to Latin America. US national and military intelligence have completely given up their integrity, and it resonated with me that the key word that Ralph uses throughout this book–a word I myself adopt in my latest book in carrying on the tradition of Buckminster Fuller on the one hand, and most respected mentor-critic Chuck Spinney on the other–is that very word: INTEGRITY.

Continue reading “Review: Endless War–Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization”

Review: Willful Neglect–The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration)
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Final Review: Ground-Level View of Obvious Vulnerabilities and a General Failure to Protect

February 10, 2010 [final review 21 February]

Sam Faddis

My own new book is finally at the printer, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty and I am really enjoying getting back into serial reading. I totally respected and agreed with this author's first book, Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and I find this ground-level view “from our enemies' eyes” to be quite helpful, accurate, and alarming.

This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.

Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.

What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.

Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).

Chapter one takes down two military facilities.
Continue reading “Review: Willful Neglect–The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security”

Review: The Myth of Digital Democracy

5 Star, Communications, Culture, Research, Democracy, Information Society, Information Technology, Misinformation & Propaganda, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Righteous New Knowledge, Rock Solid Achievement

February 20, 2010

Matthew Hindman

I read in threes and fours, this book is part of the set that includes SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful.

This book educated me. It challenged and soundly negated some of my assumptions, but it also reinforced my view that the Internet at this time is a communications network, not a knowledge network or an action network.

Here is the last paragraph:

“Yet where the Internet has failed to live up to its billing has to do with the most direct kind of political voice. If we consider the ability of ordinary citizens to write things that other people will see, the Internet has fallen far short of the claims that continue to be made about it. It may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard.”

Totally awesome. This is an impressive piece of work. At Phi Beta Iota I am posting four web diagrams showing top news and political sites and a couple of other things (I no longer post images to Amazon after they removed 354 images as a lazy way of censoring twelve copies of Obama-Bush sharing the same face–I no longer trust Amazon with my work, hence Phi Beta Iota–and a lesson about Internet abuse).

Behind this elegant book is a great deal of hard work with lots of math, lots of elbow grease, and lots of time spent making sense of massive amounts of data. I am totally impressed.

High points for me, having earlier raved about Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything as well as Cass Sunstein's Republic.com:

01) Digital divide is not the only divide–Internet is a winner take all environment

02) Liberals predominate online

03) Googlearchy has replaced meritocracy…top ten sites rule, everyone else go fish

04) Pornography and webmail are the two big dogs on the Internet, followed by search engines and a very small news set. In comparison to webmail, news is less than 20%, and in comparison to news, politics is perhaps 1% at best (of news–a tiny tiny fraction of it all).

05) The author does not really get into the deep web, the reality that there are over 75 search engines and Goolge is losing marketshare, or the fact that China and India and Brazil are creeping up and will one day soon hit a vertical rise in their web presence, especially now that kanji and other webname character sets are accepted.

06) The heart of the book, but not the bulk of the book, is about the “missing middle” and the very real fact that ordinary citizens are neither seen nor heard within the Internet overall and within the political chambers of the Internet particularly.

My review does not do this book justice. It is profoundly deeper than my summary above.

The book does reinforce my view that we must get all research and all budgets online, and that we must create the World Brain Institute and the Global Game, mandate true cost information online, and start using citizen buying power to move capitalism in a more moral sustainable useful direction (see my review just posted of Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country and my many other reviews of books on capitalism, one more of which I will mention here, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.

Four more links within my Amazon “allowance”:
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change
Don't Bother Me Mom–I'm Learning!
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

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See the three copied graphics:

Graphic (3): Myth of Digital Democracy