5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Endearing, Inspiring, Useful, Rooted in Reality, June 3, 2012
The author asked me if I would review this book, and sent me a PDF version. I've just gone through it and it earns a solid five. If you have any doubts, use Amazon's great Look Inside the Book feature, and read the specifics in the Table of Contents.
It was the table of contents that first impressed me. I've been an intelligence professional most of my life, and in the process of getting to 60 years of age, have developed four strategic analytic models that remains best in class today. I also read a lot — across 98 non-fiction categories, with the last 1,800+ books reviewed here at Amazon (and accessible by category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog).
I say all of that by way of saying that the author's selection and articulation of the core issues facing humanity — immediately followed by the author's even more inspired outlining of key values, key behaviors, key perspectives — all with citations interspersed and talking points for parents or mentors or teachers and children — impressed me enormously.
5.0 out of 5 stars Capstone Work–Light in Places, Super-Deep in Others, June 1, 2012
I read a lot — across 98 categories (access my Amazon reviews via category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog). WITHOUT HESITATION, this book is easily a solid five. Early in the book I have it as a four, annoyed by the shallowness of some of the pieces and the error on Jonathan Pollard–this treasonous scum-bag went to other countries before he got to Israel, in no way is he a Jewish hero, only a traitor–but by the time I finish the book I am tempted to go with a six (10% of my reading). It is a solid five. Those that think less of this book are missing the knowledge foundation necessary to appreciate what the author has done in 300 pages covering the last hundred years.
I mention those up front to frame my view of this book as a serious combination of scholarly research and investigative journalism. Had the author included a who's who of key individual players as an appendix, this would have been a six.
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.
It began with that monstrous young man so evil we needed to blindfold him and strap him to a board, that confusing young man who looked like Christ but cast us in the role of crucifiers, that treasonous young man who brought dark and heathen evils across linguistic and cultural borders and brought torture onto the list of accepted government actions.
When you hear the phrase “American Taliban” you probably think of a young American who betrayed his country, aided its enemies, and – like Saddam Hussein – was behind the attacks of 9-11. John Walker Lindh was an American. That part is accurate. He converted to Islam at age 16 and traveled to Yemen to study classical Arabic and Islamic theology. In 2001 he went to Afghanistan to join an ongoing battle between a political group funded by Russia and another group funded by the United States. Lindh joined the group that was backed and funded by the Bush Administration. It was called the Taliban. Lindh trained to fight the Northern Alliance, not civilians, and not the United States. But, after 9-11, the United States attacked the Taliban, and Lindh attempted to escape and return to America.
Instead he and other soldiers were captured by the Northern Alliance and beaten senseless in the presence of two CIA officers, Johnny “Mike” Spann and Dave Tyson, who interrogated Lindh and threatened him with death on the spot. When some of the other prisoners rebelled (Lindh was not involved), Northern Alliance troops shot and killed scores of prisoners, many with their arms tied behind their backs. Lindh was shot in the leg. Spann was killed. (Though he was not involved, Lindh was later charged with conspiracy to murder Spann.)
What makes this book spectacular–and strongly recommended for anyone–student or adult–who desires to understand the history of the United States of America with intelligence and integrity–is the elegantly straight-forward but devastatingly disturbing blend of facts–with superb notes at the end of each chapter.
I am very disappointed that the publisher has not taken advantage of Amazon's absolutely priceless “Look Inside the Book” feature, so I will take the time here to list chapters and appendices.
Eric Rosenbach is a former academic who is now deputy assistant secretary of defence in Washington. Aki Peritz used to work for the CIA and now advises the Third Way think tank. Their book, therefore, is not a breathless account of terrorist-hunting nor the sensational inside story of how, in Obamaās words, āWe got himā (bin Laden). Rather, it is an exposition of legal, bureaucratic, political and military developments within the US following 9/11, illustrated by summaries of how various terrorists were killed or captured. If you want thrills and spills, go elsewhere, but if you are a student of counter-terrorism or are interested in the legal limbo of rendition, detention and targeted killings, you should probably read it.
The title refers to the process of finding terrorists ā establishing who they are ā then fixing their whereabouts, then finishing them off. The first two are generally intelligence tasks, the last military, and for the process to work it requires careful co-ordination. This may seem obvious but it wasnāt always so; the book usefully catalogues missed opportunities pre-9/11 for killing or capturing bin Laden and other leading terrorists. It also points out that there were around 70 renditions ā US seizures of wanted terrorists from third countries with the agreement of host governments ā before 9/11, under Clinton. āExtraordinary renditionsā are seizures without the consent of the host, most if not all of which have taken place post-9/11.
