What this book does is piece together all of the English-language reports over the past ten years or so regarding the probabilities and specifics of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's having acquired several forms or portable nuclear devices. Although some reviewers have slammed this book for being fictional, they do not know what they are talking about. The FACTS are that the Soviet general officer responsible for the 100 suitcase nuclear bombs designed for Spetznatz use, some pre-positioned in the USA, has said publicly, in writing, and on more than one occasion that 66 of those are unaccounted for.
I took one star off for excessive reliance on two secondary sources, both excellent but never-the-less cited too often, and the commensurate lack of attention to foreign language materials that could have deepened this study considerably, especially when one takes into account the CIA executive analyst's comments in IMPERIAL HUBRIS regarding the straight truth-telling that can be found in Bin Laden's Arabic-language postings. “Nuclear hell storm” is out there (the author does cite this), and we had better take this more seriously than our government has.
The author opens with a notional “letter to America” from Bin Laden that is based on Bin Laden's actual statements (as itemized in IMPERIAL HUBRIS) and is alone worth the price of the book. If we don't take a long hard look at ourselves and correct the misbehavior that is radicalizing over a billion Muslims, we will not (not!) win this war.
The author does a really fine job, not just of amassing and stringing together a coherent story of Bin Laden's likely possession of nuclear capabilities, but also of showing the inter-relationship between the Afghanistan drug fields that the U.S. Government has stupidly allowed to flourish, the Pakistani production facilities that take the opium to a “Number 4” level of quality, and criminal organizations as well as corrupt governments everywhere that facilitate Bin Laden's operations. The roles of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan (especially Pakistan) in facilitating the storage, refurbishment, and technical maintenance of the purchased nuclear elements are covered in a manner that persuades me–this is a very real threat.
The book is a useful compilation of both mistakes by the US, and events taking place from 2002-2004, and it ends with full translated copies of the 23 Aug 96 Fatwa and the related 23 Feb 98 World Islamic Statement. Within the book are some extracts from Al Qaeda training manuals, one portion of which make it clear that the “sleepers” now in the US are specifically forbidden to go to mosques or appear Islamic in any way.
Bottom line, totally consistent with the other two books I recommend: the US needs to meet Bin Laden's reasonable demands, and redirect its focus from occupying Islamic countries toward cleaning up its own homeland. [I realize that calling Bin Laden's demands “reasonable” in going to infuriate many people, but I have to say, based on all three books taken as a whole, that all three authors agree on this point, and they have persuaded me. We cannot win if we persist in supporting 44 dictators, occupying Muslim lands, demanding cheap oil at the expense of the Muslim populations, and supporting an Israel that is racist as well as terrorist in nature toward the Palestinians. It is what it is–the sooner we stop deceiving ourselves, and demand that our government get back to the ideals of moral capitalism and truly representative democracy, the sooner we have a chance to avoid this “nuclear hellstorm” that I believe this book credibly documents as a very real possibility.]
The one book to read if only one, not a substitute for many,
June 27, 2004
James Bamford
I know Jim Bamford personally, and consider him to be one of the most capable of researchers and most objective of writers on intelligence matters. His deep personal relationships across the U.S. Intelligence Community make him the best possible reporter.For those of us steeped in the literature, that routinely read both the daily reporting and the regular books, much of what Jim has put together here will be repetitive. This is, however, the very best book to read if you only have the time for one book on the topic of 9-11, the failure of U.S. intelligence, and the corruption of U.S. policy in using 9-11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and giving Bin Laden the best possible (i.e. most stupid) strategic response to 9-11.
This is the ideal book for any citizen who wants a professional “once over” tour of the various intelligence and policy pieces that broke down and allowed 9-11 to happen, and then allowed the entire “balance of powers” construct from our Founding Fathers to fly out the window. If you want to go deeper, see my thirteen Lists and 479+ other reviews of national security non-fiction.
The book is especially strong on the Rendon Group being used to illegally propagandize American citizens with U.S. taxpayer funds, on the abject failure of George Tenet in revitalizing U.S. clandestine operations, on the failure (treated more kindly) of Mike Hayden to bring the National Security Agency into the 21st Century, and on the very unhealthy merger of the U.S. neoconservatives that captured the White House, and well-funded Zionists in both America and Israel who essentially bought themselves an invasion of Iraq–a remarkable coincidence of interests: Jews paying to invade Iraq, Iranians using Chalabi to feed lies to the neo-cons so they would be deceived into thinking Iraq would be a cake-walk, and Bin Laden never daring to dream the entire U.S. population and all arms of government–including a passive media–would “sleep walk” into what this book suggests is one of the dumbest and most costly strategic errors in the national security history of the USA.
This book is not, despite some of the ideologically-motivated reviews below, an attack of George Bush Junior, as much as it is an appalled and informed review of how a complex government collapsed in the face of 9-11, and a handful of ostensibly patriotic and very myopic individuals were able to abuse their personal power because all of the professional counter-forces: the diplomats, the spies, the military professionals, the Congress, the media–every single one was not sufficiently competent nor sufficiently motivated to mandate a more balanced policy process that could understand the many global threats (terrorism and Iraq are actually two of the lesser ones), devise a comprehensive long-term strategy, and execute that strategy using *all* of the instruments of national power, including strong global alliances that lead all governments to fight all gangs in the most effective fashion possible.
We let kids play with matches, and they burned down the house.
Disclosure: I knew and served with Janine Brookner as a case officer overseas. I liked her then and I like her now even through I have not heard from her since we ran into one another in the halls near SOG Maritime in the late 1980's. She deserved to win her case against the white-boy wanna-be-preppy bubbas that are destroying the Directorate of Operations today, and now, with the modest sum she got after paying her lawyer, she has–after law school and substantive experience taking on US Intelligence Community lawyers–*nailed it* with a book that is both a lawyer's dream and every intelligence professional's awakening.
I have myself had experience with security morons (these are the guys that got to their high ranks after twenty years of checking safes at night), and I have also had experience with the very high quality people that CIA has in the Office of the General Counsel and in some positions in security. Interestingly, when I had my problem with morons, the Deputy Director of Security was a woman, she got it, and she fixed it. On balance, from experience, I give CIA as a whole and the US Intelligence Community over-all, very very high marks for being good to its people and bending over backwards to avoid harassment. If anything, as the Ames case showed, the Agency has been too tolerant of aberrant behavior (alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide are too high in the DO, although this has improved in the past ten years). I also have to give the Agency's publications review process an A+. Tough love critic of the CIA/IC that I am, I have *never* felt abused by the righteous and correct process that I signed a lifetime deal on.
There are, however, with the above as context, two major problems that this book addresses, and Janine Brookner has earned my “beyond five stars” for the service she renders with her methodical and documented endeavor. This book is an instant classic and reference manual in two ways:
1) When “management” decides to railroad someone, they have unlimited power to do so, and most people cannot fight back. I was myself rail-roaded by a man named Ted Price, a real mediocrity, a small man with a Napoleon complex, and it took me years to get the system to clean up the mess he made. I was not smart enough to fight back legally. This book empowers the many people who have been set to “Fitness for Duty” physicals (emphasis on showing them to be nuts, or scaring them into resigning for fear of being officially classified as nuts and barred from further federal employment). I know several such people, both analysts and operators, and in every single case it was management that was nuts or derelict in its duty, not the officers. The officers were all out-spoken, deeply in love with their profession and proud of their work, and loath to see the system break down as it has (and as we all knew it would from about 1985 onwards). Had the “nuts” been listened to in the 1980's and 1990's, 9-11 would not have happened and George Tenet would not be making excuses for having faired to unscrew the Directorate of Operations in the past seven years. Now he needs another five years, with the same fools in charge? Please.
2) The other area where this book is vital is in outlining in terms that any Senator or Representative (most of them lawyers) can understand–there needs to be a legal section in the National Security Act that is inevitably making its way toward passage. I used to think that a FISA Court Ombudsman–someone we all trust, like Ken Bass, one of the twelve masters of the court, or Janine Brookner herself, was the solution. What this book had demonstrated to me is that there are both too many problems (and more remedies than I realized), and someone has to codify a body of law that remediates the dysfunctionality of personnel protections within an archipelago of secret fiefdoms.
This book is relevant to both the lawyers and the serving professionals in each of the seven tribes of intelligent work: national, military, law enforcement, business, academia, NGO-investigative journalism, and citizen-labor-religions, because all organizations in the last ten years have been moving toward what one early critic of the CIA called “the cult of secrecy.” Credit card companies and other vendors are including binding arbitration on their terms as a condition of the sale, and those not reading the fine print are trapped into giving up all of their existing rights under due process law, including rights to a jury trial. Secrecy goes hand in hand with corruption and bad practices that desires concealment, so this book is relevant as a guide to what happens when secrecy and corruption are taken to their nth degree.
Edited 23 August 2007 after a visit to the Middle East, and additional reflection on how Nations turn stupid. FOX News is, as we speak, leading a massive campaign to deceive Americans into thinking that we must attack Iran. Iran is Persian. They are running circles around us as our Army hollows out and our four carriers steam within range of Iranian Sunburn missiles. Adding two images and several hot links to books that make it quite clear that this book is by, of, and for idiots.
Edited after over a year to reflect the deep impression that “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris has made on me. Amazon does not allow edited reviews to increase the star level, so I will say that after Harris, I would raise this book to two stars with the following obervation: having the right instincts–wanting to go after Iran in particular, and Syria–does not justify lying to the public or failing to do your homework.
Of the 3,000 or so volumes in my current library, I have only reviewed 950. I do not write negative reviews as a rule. This is my third exception to the latter rule. The most ignorant book was one on predicting revolution, the second most ignorant book was one on sources of conflict, and this is the third.
The authors, who demonstrate how far one could get in the Cold War military without reading or thinking, call this a military assessment. It is not. It is a one-track discourse on why we need to use our heavy metal military to wipe out Syria and Iran and intimidate Libya and Pakistan. It avoids discussing Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Central Asia, Muslim Africa, and Muslim Pacifica. This is not analysis, this is flim-flam.
By way of context in my specific criticism of this book, let me just note that the bibliography does not reflect any appreciation for strategy, e.g. Colin Gray's “Modern Strategy”, or Col Dr. Max Manwaring and Ambassadors Corr and Dorff's “The Search for Security”, or Willard Matthias “America's Strategic Blunders” or Adda Bozeman's “Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft” or Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.” I looked in vain for any sign the authors might comprehend the strategic context in which their specific beliefs and recommendations can only be seen as ill-advised. For example, a reference to Shultz, Godson, and Quester (at least one of whom is a neo-conservative), “Security Studies for the 21st Century”, or Robert McNamara and James Blight “Wilson's Ghost”, or Dean Jeffrey Garten's “The Politics of Fortune”, or Republican and conservative Clyde Prestowitz's “Rogue Nation”, or Ambassador Mark Palmer's “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil”. No cognizance of Kissinger, even.
Never mind all those *democratic* thought leaders, like Senator David Boren et al (and including Bob Gates), “Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century”, or Joesph Nye on “The Paradox of American Power” or William Shawcross (a Brit) on “Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict”, or Paul Krugman's “The Great Unraveling.”
I did not expect to find, but mention as a final setting of the stage for a very critical review, just a sampling of books relevant to getting the war on terror right: books like Chalmer's Johnson, “The Sorrors of Empire” or Derek Leebaert's “The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory” or Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies on “Why Do People Hate America” (which could be sub-titled, most relevantly for the authors under review, “and why doesn't America understand the real world”), or any of the last 100 non-fiction books on national security that I have reviewed here, generally to very favorable judgements by Amazon visitors.
Finally, I contrast this book with Richard Clarke's book “Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror” which I recommend very highly. Clarke is real, these people are not.
I finally figured it out. This is a puff piece of, by, and for FOX Cable News viewers.
There are no footnotes in this book. It is a rambling opinion piece. Let us not confuse rank with brains, or opinions with thought. This is a double-spaced book that could probably be distilled to 30 pages of core reading, all summed up as “we're always right, no matter the cost.” This book also adopts the Richard Perle neoconservative game plan of using terrorism as a pretext to invade Syria and Iran. I assure each and every one of you, a universal draft is planned for after the election. Your sons and daughters will be sacrificed to the lack of strategic thinking that this book represents.
The book ends on two false notes. Although the authors demonstrate a semblance of balance in calling for better public diplomacy and especially the restoration of the US Information Agency, they continue to emphasize money for guns and the early use of the military in expeditionary mode, rather that a truly transformative strategy that begins with understanding the full range of threats facing us (bacteria are more dangerous than terrorists), devising a strategy for dealing with those threats by using *all* of the instruments of national power, and then a balanced budget that achieves all of that without sacrificing the earning potential of future generations.
Finally, we have thirteen pages of photographs where the authors proudly display their field trip photos, and what leaps out to the veteran's eye is that they were always in air-conditioned rooms and cars and never broke a sweat. As my good friend Robert Young Pelton likes to say (he is author of “The World's Most Dangerous Places”–you should all read it), these guys live and think in a bubble–they don't get into the gutter, they don't smell the shit, and they have no idea how close their fantasy world is to destruction from forces that are beyond their comprehension.
Iraq, and the planned war on Syria and Iran, are indeed a recurrence of Vietnam in the sense that ignorance and arrogance among the elite in power, and apathy among the public and within Congress, are creating a most costly global quagmire that will shortly explode in Australia, Thailand, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The authors have learned nothing from history nor from the many non-partisan American strategists and scholars available to advise them.
I don't think this book is worth the purchase price, except as an example of the kinds of books, and kinds of people, that place loyalty to ideology above and apart from the public interest.
The authors have one thing right: this is a battle of wills. They do not appear to realize that there are not enough guns on the planet to execute their strategy, and that legitimacy is an intangible value that was lost to America from 2001 to date. This book is a blueprint for a nuclear winter in which America self-immolates. An Israeli tactical nuclear attack on Iran will kick off the end of the American Empire, and that may well be the best thing that could happen, to awaken the somolent Republic. We must indict and impeach Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rudy Gulliani, and we must indict and sentence to death Larry Silverstein for his role in the controlled demotion of the World Trade Center including WTC 7 which was not hit by anything, it was also brought down to destroy evidence and complete the highly profitable elimination of asbestor at the cost of thousands of NYC lives. I am quite certain the insurance companies were part of the scam, because I have read and viewed more than enough evidence to be certain all the buildings were brought down by Larry Silverstean and his despicable little band of murderers.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is considered by the Chinese to be one of America's top strategists (along with Steve Metz from the Army War College), and that is entirely his due. He is brilliant when it comes to state-centric strategy, but falls short with respect to emerging threats, sub-state threats, intelligence reform, and the roles of non-governmental organizations including religions, and civil networks instead of government-driven “command and control.”While it used to be fashionable, when confronted with a choice between, say, market economies and controlled economies, to cleverly say “some of each” and earn the top grade, today things have changed and the answer is more often than not, “none of the above.” This estimable author, whose wisdom must certainly be taken into account at all times, does not actually present a choice, only an opinion as to how a state-centric system–largely irrelevant in the 21st Century–might best be managed.
Especially troubling to me was the almost complete lack of attention to substantive books published in the last ten years, including those, most recently, of George Soros (abusive capitalism), William Greider (immoral capitalism), Herman Daly (ecological economics), Jonathan Schell (unconquerable world), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Thomas Stewart (the wealth of knowledge as an alternative to violence), and so on. The author is not alone in this oversight–Joseph Nye, whose book on Soft Power I am also reviewing today, bases his work on Op-Eds, many of them not written by the people signing them, and has almost no substantive references either. The think tank culture has lost touch with true scholarship.
The author's claim that Washington, D.C. is the center of the earth (pages 131-132) reflect in my view the last gasp of the Reagan-Smart Bush-Clinton era. While the author alludes to New York as the “other center”, I and my colleagues think instead of a loose network on “nodes”, some financial (Tokyo, London, Kuala Lumpur), some religious (Jerusalem, Rome, Salt Lake City, points in India), and so on. The author's emphasis on the Trilateral Commission and the now-dying World Economic Forum (Davos) as the bastions of a global elite that is in agreement struck me as being astonishing insular and inaccurate. The author says that “This elite is fostering the emergence of a global community of shared interest in stability, prosperity, and perhaps eventually democracy.” I do not think so. All the other books I have reviewed for Amazon suggest that this elite is doing all it can to plunder the world by enriching micro-elites through corruption, while disenfranchising the broader publics (e.g. Canadian companies displacing villages in Peru to loot the gold, French companies buying up the water in Brazil to increase charges to the public for the water they used to own, etc.).
The author is to be commended for at least recognizing that America is losing its moral standing in the world, and this is an intangible value that cannot be easily purchased nor replaced.
In passing, footnote 4 on page 38 is inadvertently incorrect. There are 175 violent internal political conflicts, not 38. There are also 32 countries engaged in complex emergencies, 66 with millions of displaced refugees, 59 with plagues and epidemics, 33 with massive starvation, and 18 genocides now on-going.
The book ends somewhat quietly, suggesting a transatlantic convention and what one other reviewer very appropriately called “baby steps.” My bottom line: Brzezinski is a solid citizen with a big mind and an old framework. He *must* be consulted for his wisdom as we move forward, but it falls to others now to define the bold new steps–faith-based diplomacy, ecological economics, public intelligence, global accountability of leaders–that are essential is we are save the world for our children.
Most Scholarly Documentation of Bush-Blair Deceit,
February 13, 2004
Dilip Hiro
In some ways, this book is a great deal more distressing than the various pundit books slamming Bush (Moore, Hightower, Frankel, Krugman, Carville, etc.) because there is not a single caustic turn of phrase, not a single line of satire, not a single double entendre in the entire work. This is a brutally straight-forward, earnestly researched, ably footnoted, totally credible review of all of the secrets and lies that led to the war in Iraq.It did not quite bring me to tears, it did very nearly make me want to throw a chair through the garden window.
According to this book, and its incontrovertible documentation, we were lied to. We were deceived. Untold fighting men and women, not just from the US but also from other countries, have died and been wounded and according to this book the number of wounded is CLASSIFIED. It is a secret, an official secret from the American public, how many of their sons and daughters have died to support this ideological conquest, this extremist religious crusade. We must also acknowledge the thousands of dead Iraqis and the hundreds of thousands of displaced and impoverished Iraqis.
Another official secret from the American public are the results of the open survey by the Department of State of how the Iraqis feels about the US invasion and occupation–classified AFTER we discovered that Chalabi had lied to Cheney and there were no hearts and flowers, only hostility.
Yet another official secret from the American public is the estimate of the damage done by US forces to the Iraqi infrastructure, and how much it will cost the US taxpayer to pay for this mindless destruction in the heart of the Middle East.
Not discussed by the author, but very much on my mind, is the jungle drum word from the retired veterans with access to Bethesda and other military hospitals—on the basis of the 250,000 disabled veterans from Gulf 1, and the “word” filtering out from the wards, we are looking at upwards of 25,000, perhaps as many as 100,000 disabled veterans from this war–all from depleted uranium, a killer of our own making. Worse, this disability is multi-generational and will lead to blind and maimed children among those veterans who are able to have children.
This book is a cold-hearted look–so cold-hearted it ignites a flame of righteous anger in any careful reader–at how America has destroyed its credibility and its ability to have a positive influence in the Middle East.
If I have one small criticism, it is that the author, a stellar authority with solid sources to call upon, did not do an appendix that laid out an entire timeline of what Bush and Blair said that was false, and then the counter-vailing truth. Although the author makes a number of these points clear throughout the book, for example, the UN never passed a resolution calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, an opportunity has been lost here.
Truth matters. Paul O'Neil is correct to speculate that we will heal ourselves, and equally correct to point out that this will happen only if we speak and hear the truth about these grievous circumstances in which great evil was done “in our name.” This book, more so than the others that I cited above, is perhaps the first serious building block toward righting our ship of state.
One of Several Valuable References, Misses the Gland Slam,
January 25, 2004
Joe Conason
This book is one of several (Hightower, Franken, Moore being among the others) that does a good job but not the best job of nailing extremist Republican lies and distortions.It is a great index, something the other books have tended to neglect. You can, for example, look up national security or minorities, or health care, and get right to the relevant lies. You can also look up individual names and see the specifics on both corporate cronies of the extreme right, or media manipulators.
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