I would normally give a book like this four stars because it is a collection of speeches entered into the Congressional Record over a 30-year period with no overview. I give it five stars because of the integrity and consistency of the author, and because he is the only person now running for President that has a completely serious book available for review.
I was disappointed that there was no strategic overview touching on each critical foreign policy region or each of the high-level threats to humanity such as depicited by the Earth Intelligence Network in support of the Transpartisan Policy Institute, but my disappointment is tempered by the realization that the author, in citing Thomas Jefferson on the dedication page, to wit: “Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship with All Nations–Engangling Alliances with None” (First Inaugural Address, 1801) makes it clear that it can indeed be “that simple.”
Throughout the book the author touches on truly fundamental themes:
1) Restoration of the Constitution as the fouindation for all Congressional and Executive policies, budgets, and decisions.
2) The importance of avoiding the cost of foreign adventures while investing in domestic needs for education, infrastructure, energy independence and so on.
3) The importance of having a currency backed by real wealth, not the fabricated wealth used by the banks to enrich themselves at our expense.
4) The importance of civil liberties, sound decision-making, and ethics
I'd like to see this honest man win and be President. His integrity and intelligence are absolute, something no other candidate can claim. However, unless he can pick a transpartisan Cabinet in advance of the election, and guide that Cabinet in producing a balanced budget that eliminates our multi-trillion unfunded future obligations, he will be no better than the others, and even at a disadvaantage, because voters hear platitudes. They need to see real policies with real budget numbers, or they will not see the difference between this author and the others in tangible terms they can appreciate.
State Terrorism Vastly Worse, Individual Terrorism Logical
September 6, 2007
Matthew Carr
This is a superb book that should be read in conjunction with Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Terrorism is nothing more nor less than individual and small group asymmetric violence that breaks the state's monopoly on violence.
THe author is to be commended for stating in blunt and ably-documented terms that terrorism is a logical asymmetric response and it is not senseless nor cowardly but rather coherent and calculated.
I share the author's view that most Western analysts of terrorism are witness, uninformed, and devoid of historical, cultural, or contextual analytic skills and knowledge. Most on the right, including the Zionists, push their ideological beliefs rather than the empirical evidence. As the author notes, Israel has genocided the Palestinians and out-terrorized their opponents time and again (while also attacking the USS Liberty, a war crime that will never be forgotten by our men and women in uniform).
The author ends by calling the US Government, essential, a persistent liar, with hollow propaganda and specious claims that–in combination with the destruction of civil liberties–do vastly more damage to the national fabric than any small band of terrorists might. As one reviewer notes, what 19 alleged terrorists have done is nothing compared to the state terror that Bush-Cheney have unleashed on Iraq, Iran, around the world in secret renditions and secret torture, and of course here at home, where a “state of fear” and grotesque abuses of executive privilege are used to avoid justice and liberty for all, reducing both dignity and accountability.
I've read one other book that led me to conclude that I had to read this one, both in relation to what is now known about the Warren Commission Report. I consider these important because precisely the same kind of cover-up happened with the 9-11 Commission, and I strongly believe that Dick Cheney should be impeached and then indicted along with Rudy Gulliani and Larry Silverstein and Donald Rumsfeld for the murder of thousands by controlled demolitions and a missile into the Pentagon that destroyed all the computers needed to understand the missing 2.3 trillion that Donald Rumsfeld was being grilled on by Congresswoman McKinney on 10 September.
This is a phenomenal piece of work that makes superb use of social network analysis (who knows who) to connect the dots.
The bottom line: Kennedy was killed by Cuban exiles who set Oswald up as a patsy. Oswald was at his usual lunchroom place in the library where he had reason to be, and the Chief of Police of Dallas is on record as saying they could never connect Oswald to either the window from which the shots were a llegedly fired, or the gun that was claimed to be the assassination weapon. The first officer to enter the building minutes after the shooting placed Osxwald at his usual place in the lunchroom, and Oswald tested negative for gunpowder residue.
Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, including a staged call to the KGB specialist in assassination, and other trails were left with the intent of proving that Castro had Kennedy assassinated, and hoping to both punish Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs betrayal and for cracking down on Cuban exile missions at the same time that he was authorizing 13 sabotage missions to Cuba.
The evidence is compelling. Robert Kennedy was worried about Castro retaliating against him and his brother. It is now clear that CIA training of Cubans to assassinate Castro was in fact turned against Kennedy.
Three CIA employees are featured: David Philipps who specialized in the big lie; E. Howard Hunt, and David Morales, Operations Chief of JMWAVE under Ted Shackley.
The conspiracy to point the finger at Castro failed, but the true assasins were allowed to go undiscovered because Lyndon Johnson and the Presidents physician began am immediate cover-up, as did the FBI, CIA, and the Secret Service.
The book is compelling in demonstrating that ample warnings had been received by the Secret Service, to the point that the President was personally briefed by Bobby Kennedy, but JFK went ot his death on his own volition–he blew off the warnings.
The cover-ups by the three agencies bear a stricking resemblance to the cover-up of the Oklahmoa City bombing, where unexploded thermite bombs were found on some pillars, and the “loner” theory simply does not stand up. Similarly, Cheney, Gulliani, and Silverstein pre-arranged for the scooping and dumping of the evidence of controlled demolitions from 9-11, and Rumsfeld covered up the fact that a missile, not an airplane was targetted on the Pentagon by our own treasoous officers willing to obey an illegal order and murder their own for the Zionist-NeoCon cause, while also destroying the computers holding evidence of where the “lost 2.3 trillion dollars had gone.
The exiles boasted privately of having been promised additional new funding by the mafia, including the Jewish mafia with casino interests in Cuba, provided they took care of Kennedy and incited an invasion of Cuba.
It is not clear from the book if other US leaders sanctioned the killing. I am inclined to think not. Hoover had all the blackmail material he needed to keep his job. Johnson does not come into the picture until after t he fact, when it became clear that if Bobby Baker talked, Johnson would go to jail for blatant contacts with organized crime and for blatant use of his office to obtain bribes from military-industrial corporations.
In this book Ruby is a patsy paid to murder Oswald when Oswald is arrested and unable to make the theater meeting where he would probably have been subdued and transported to Cuba or Mexico to die under circumstances incriminating Castro. Ruby was probably told he would be freed or pardoned, and money was his primary motivation.
A series of key witnesses who were willing to talk were murdered, and Johnson personally immunized FBI agent Regis Kennedy, Oswald's handler, to keep him from talking.
Admiral Burkley, JFK's personal physician, handicapped and stopped most of the atopsy process, and concealed and manipulated evidence to support the lone gunman theory. The Navy hospital staff received a gag order similar to the one given the crew of the USS Liberty after they were deliberatedly attacked by Israel and many of them murdered by our so-called ally.
There are several take-away bottom lines relevant to today, as Dick Cheney seeks to attack Iran in the same illegal way he ordered the attack on Iraq using lies and his secret authority:
1) We cannot trust our elected politicians. They lie to us.
2) We cannot trust the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service. They lie to us.
3) We cannot trust government commissions, neither executive nor legislative, they are exercises in deception and lie to us.
The author is meticulous is documenting the long list of unsung heros whose personal research has over time brought out the truth. Similarly, I am quite certain that within five years Cheney, all the neocons, Gulliani, and Silverstein will be meticulously impeached and indicted and covicted in the public eye. They may escape to Dubai, but the truth will be known.
The book documents Johnson's offer of a $1 million bribe to Bobby Baker to keep quiet and allow the investigation to go down the path that Johnson orchestrated, of a Warren Commission brow-beaten into validating an FBI conclusion that was known to be false by all conceerned.
The books comes with great note and appendices. The author has made superb use of telephone records, diaries, and known social and professional connections. The only thing I missed from this was a two page diagram of the network as it is described.
The book is also exceptional for clearly identifying additional paths for further investigation.
I put the book down with the strong feeling that We the People need to reject every sitting member of Congress and every current candidate for President. We need to elect a transpartisan Executive team with a Cabinet announced beforehand that also publishes a balanced sustainable budget before election day, and we need to demand that every piece of legilsation henceforth be published in full one week prior to its being voted on, with no secret earmarks. The military-industrial complex is not our enemy–they are simply doing what they have been incentivized to do. Our enemy is the complete corruption of the Democratic and Republican parties, the complete corruption of our election system, and the lack of transparency on how all taxpayer funds are spent. We can fix this. A good start would be the redirection of half the Pentagon budget toward waging peace, ending our ties with all 42 of the dictators Dick Cheney embraces with such fervor, and the elimination of two thirds of all existing secret programs, using the funds instead to stand up a Multinational Information Sharing Activity that supports stabilization, reconstruction, and peacekeeping everywhere, and completely free connectivity for the five billion poor to a global network of 100 million volunteer tutors who can teach the five billion “one cell call at a time.”
Three Flaws Easily Corrected, Views are of Strategic Importance
June 28, 2007
Robert D. Hormats
would normally deduct one star for three flaws, but because they are easily corrected and the author's former boss is now Secretary of the Treasury, and perhaps powerful enough to ignore Dick Cheney's craven amoral direction as documented in both The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill and Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, I restore the one star for actionable potential. My review of the latter itemizes 23 high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Dick Cheney as documented by the authors, and no review our fiscal decrepitude can be complete without understanding how Dick Cheney has bankrupted the Republic and betrayed the Nation and our troops.
I like this author. He gets it. I would gladly work with him in remediation as he suggests, which I summarize below. First, however, the three flaws:
1) He really believes the government baloney about how the military budget is a tiny fraction of our disposable income in comparison to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Not so. See my first image. If we restore universal service (inclusive of demanding two years from anyone asking for citizenship), end most of the “support” (read: looting) contracts that transfer taxpayer wealth to Halliburton and others of their ilk, and if we reform our national health system to provide a mix of lifestyle, environmental, alternative or natural, and medical care, with drug prices based on global wholesale prices, we drop drug unit prices from $600 (US) to $6 (global), bypassing the current Canadian pricing ($60). Extend the retirement age, modify education to be lifelong, and dramatically improve minimum wages, end illegal immigration, and introduce children to the work force as apprentices earlier, and we have the flexibility to heal ourselves and get out of insolvency, which the Comptroller General told Congress is where we are as of six months ago.
2) The author understands that asymmetric warfare allows our enemies to spend $1 and we have to spend much more. Bin Laden actually said this publicly a few years ago, and my second image illustrates both “the Bin Laden equation” of $1 from them requires $500,000 from us, and also the ten threats and twelve policies that must be addressed in a harmonized inter-agency and coalition fashion, using transparent accountable information as the “glue” for information arbitrage, a term I devised in the 1990's, the conversion of information into intelligence and intelligence into profit or cost and risk reduction. The hedge fund managers have been doing this for decades, with one big difference: they manage for the profit of the few rather than the sustainable profit to the many.
3) Alluded to above, and certainly in strong support of the author's recommended program, is the role that information and public (legal, ethical, sharable) intelligence can play in creating infinite wealth. See for instance, the books below (or read my reviews as a short-cut):
I take the trouble to emphasize the above prior to summarizing the author's views, and loading a third image on how I am attempting to work with Amazon and others to create a global information arbitrage economy that includes serious games and empowers every *locality*, because “The Price of Liberty” is NOT financial, it is intellectual. Where we have gone wrong these past decades is in forgetting that if We the People drop out of politics, we are left with corrupt minority parties that are Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and a Congress that is impeachable for failing to act on two stolen elections and as the Article 1 branch of government (see for instance:
It is in this larger context that the author's views become vital to the Republic, and actionable by the current and next Secretary of the Treasury. For the record, I am betting on Bradley-Bloomberg and 16 years of transpartisan government with multi-party (5-6 parties, not two) announced in advance and elected as part of “Our Deal.”
This is a lovely history with deep meaning for our future. The author's core point is that a long war requires a long-term fiscal strategy. His elaborations make it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration, which made fiscal policy from the Office of the Vice President and continues to demean the Cabinet, has bankrupted the Nation.
The author is especially strong at showing the differences between past indebtedness and today's indebtedness. Today we have no surplus, we have an energy deficit, we have idiotic tax cuts for the wealth and an unfair burden on the poor, we continue benefits that are unaffordable and crippling to our evolution, and we are not planning for the future needs of our rapidly aging and often needy.
I was moved to conceptualize “Our Deal” after reading the author's brilliant but down to earth discussion of how the Roosevelt “New Deal” and the Truman “Fair Deal” and the Johnson “Great Society” all ran aground, more or less, because of the rocks of war. The author is clear is saying that it was the Reagan era that turned us into a debtor nation.
The author connects social justice at home with the sacrifices of our troops abroad, and concludes that the Pentagon, above all, must re-examine its allocation of resources (see my fourth image, the “Four Forces After Next” that I began recommending in 1992).
Amnesia & Ambivalence are the death of a Nation. Lack of inter-agency coordination is killing us. We need energy patriotism, savings patriotism, and I would add, democratic patriotism. I am working to create a “big bat” for Transpartisanship, one capable of raising $500M a year in Liberty Bonds with which to buy back our government and force Congress to attend to the people's priorities.
Robert Dreyfuss interviewed me once, for a piece in WIRED or Mother Jones, and I remember him as a serious, methodical person. It is no surprise to find him producing this meticulously documented and objectively constructed history, a perfect complement to Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, on whose Amazon page I have a more detailed review of the overall topic.
The author captures the essence in his own introduction: the US was so focused on anti-communism and anti-Soviet campaigns that it deliberately chose to sponsor extreme rightist Islamic fundamentalists, fascists in their own way as the extreme right in America is today (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America).
The author is very specific in addressing how the US feared “nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism” in its obsession with countering the Soviets, and so it chose to aid Islamic fundamentalists who opposed those more rational and publicly-oriented altneratives. In essence, the premise of the invasion of Iraq, that we are doing it to spread democracy, is yet another big lie–we have been denying democracy to the Arabs every since Roosevelt met with the Saudi king and formed a pact with the devil himself.
I totally agree with the author as he documents and sums up his own view that “A war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to deal with the challenge posed by political Islam.”
The author offers four prescriptions for US action, and at the end here I list some relevant books that provide a broader context:
1) Remove the grievances–US troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, support for Israel's plans to attack Iran
2) Abandon imperial pretentions in the Middle East
3) Refrain from seeking to impose preferences–political, economic, cultural, or religious, on the region
4) Stop making bellicose threats against Islamic nations from Iran to Sudan (and I would add, to Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and others)
I am reminded by this book of the common sense prescriptions in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. The raw fact is that the global literature is coming around to three points of view that are inter-related:
1) Bin Laden is largely right and on firm grounds in taking on both the debauched Saudi regime and the amoral unilaterally invasive US
2) Dick Cheney has committed so many high crimes and misdemeanors, with similar high crimes at the operational level (warrantless wiretapping on Americans, rendition and torture of all others) that America has lost all moral legitimacy both at home and abroad
3) We have the wrong global strategy, indeed we have no global strategy–we are trying to put out a forest fire with a hammer.
Some of the reviewers jump to conclusions, for example, the CIA was NOT really trying to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, until Congressman Charlie Wilson made it his personal vendetta. There is a much larger context within which American incompletence at world affairs can be judged, and it includes the shortcomings of the US educational system, the corruption of the US electoral system, and the grotesque dysfunctionality of the “winner take all” US system of governance. I hope some of the books below–or at least my reviews of them–will provide addtional context for this excellent work. See Web of Deceit for detailed comments I choose not to repeat here–the two books are a good combination with some overlap.
The American Empire Project has produced some really first-rate books on their chosen theme, and for this they are to be praised.
This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.
The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer–these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.
The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers–a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.
He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA “for repairs.” I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the “front” of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational “dirty deeds” arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.
In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the “paradigms of failure” (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that “time and technology [have] passed us by.”
As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called “Open Sores” within the now near-moronic secret world).
The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on “The Threat Matrix” and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.
The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.
On page 317 he tells us that “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts.”
He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).
He defends himself on the “slam dunk” as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.
He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that “there is no doubt” on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.
He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that “Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”
The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.
He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.
Pre 9/11 air travelers believed “be calm, see Cuba” when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a “Smart Nation.”
Erudite, State-Centric, Useful Observations in Isolation,
April 1, 2007
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Edit of 30 Mar 08 to add links.
I struggled with this book. In the context of all the other books I have read, I was hoping for something a big more fullsome and balanced. This is an erudite state-centric report card on three President's that only a Washington insider would write, and and that most who are not Washington insiders will find daunting.
The book ends with a proposition for a joint legislative-executive global policy planning council, with a shared common staff. This is a variation of the strategic body General Tony Zinni discusses in his most recent book, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose.
I put the book down feeling empty–indeed–with some dispair. Is this all there is? No big ideas such as the restoration of the US Information Agency and the creation of an Open Source Agency as called for on page 413 of the 9-11 Commission. No mention of a miniscule tax on every Federal Reserve transactiion, allowing the elimination of all individual income taxes. No mention of the 5 billion at the bottom of the pyramid, of the ten high-level threats, twelve policies, and eight other major players. No mention at all of the military-industrial complex and the heavy metal military that Presidents from both parties have been all too willing to go along with. No mention of the two trillion a year illicit economy (in the context of a 7-9 trillion total global economy), see Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.
No mention of the fact that it was this author who gave the Pakistani's a bye on their nuclear plans, or the direct connection between Iranian funding of the Pakistani program, and their probable possession of a nuclear tipped Russian Sunburn missile (carrier killer, zig-zags at 2.2 Mach).
America needs a transpartisan government that ends the winner take all approach to leadership, and that starts with a balanced sustainable budget. The Comptroller General has declared the USA to be insolvent. It's going to take a lot more than high-sounding platitudes to get America back on track. There are 27 secessionist movements, Vermont's being the most powerful, for good reason: it is time to dissolve this government, and the two political “gangs” that share the spoils that are not theirs to give, in order to restore the Republic of, by, and for the people. The image I have loaded gives a sense of what I was hoping to see. Joe Nye comes closer with his Soft Power ideas. World War III is about two things: unleashing the innovative energy of the five billion in extreme poverty, and spreading the gospel of tolerance and diversity. Both demand $3 billion a year for a massive global free online educational network in all languages, accessible via low-cost cell phones.
If America gets a second chance, it will be from the bottom up. The existing political enterprise is worse than dead, it is a rotting carcass that needs to be burned. Brzezinski addresses the superficial outcomes of a grotesqley flawed and out-dated system (Kissinger did well on this in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century but then he's also done it wrong, see The Trial of Henry Kissinger. America and the world are too complicated to be run by one white man and his cronies, all controlled by corporations that internalize profit and externalize social cost. If we do not focus on a revolution in the minds and hearts of all humanity, neither our diplomats nor our warriors will be able to stop the immolation of the planet.
30 years of speeches, straight common sense
