This is a helpful book, useful and pointed, that attempts to document, with some but not complete success, the charge that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were concocted threats spawned by the CIA and used by the Bush Administration to permit unilateral military operations aimed at capturing Central Asian and Iraqi energy resources.
The author has clearly done a great deal of research and independent thinking, but the book would have benefited considerably from an intergration of the timelines and other thoughts to be found in such excellent works as “Crossing the Rubicon,” “Resource Wars” etcetera.
The author's central thesis is that we are moving toward a totalitarians new world order in which war, police repression, and predatory economic policies are integrated and interface with one another to create a privileged wealth class, and impoverish the rest of the world including the American and Canadian middle classes. It merits comment that the author's primary scholarly accomplishments are in the economic arena, and this book is appreciated more if one also reads his “The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order.”
The author points out something I did NOT know from my other 700 books as reviewed here at Amazon: that Bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital on 10-11 September. This coincides with other authors who have suggested that 9-11 was originally intended to be a nuclear event, and was, by agreement between the Bush Administration and the Pakistani government, “downgraded” to a controlled hijacking.
The author is courageous and on point when he suggests that we now have war criminals in office who have the temerity to decide who is a terrorist and who is a criminal. As the author's work implies, Dick Cheney is right up there with Henry Kissinger in terms of actions against international law that could warrant his being extradicted to stand trial before the Tribunal.
The author also makes useful points–in harmony with other authors now emergent–to the effect that the drug crop in Afghanistan is essential to Wall Street and the international banks, and is fully the equal of oil trade in its importance to international speculators and economic power brokers.
There are some disconcerting errors within the book, for example, the author states that the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is $30 billion a year, when anyone who follows the U.S. Intelligence Community knows that this was at the time the TOTAL budget for all the secret agencies, with CIA receiving roughly one tenth of the total. Today the budget is close to $60 billion, CIA is a disaster area, and America is no safer.
Overall the author focuses primarily on the CIA as the source of all evil, and completely neglects both the FBI, whose incompetence or collaboration were essential to both World Trade Center attacks (the car bomb, and then the airplane attacks), and he also tends to neglect, for lack of understanding, any mention of the Saudi Arabian private intelligence network that displaced CIA long ago, as well as the private global murder network (see my review of Joseph Trento, “Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA.”
There is a very clear pattern emerging in the broader literature that suggests that the Bush Administration is impeachable, and that the Clinton Administration before it is also impeachable, for a deliberate neglect of reasoned energy policy, and a deliberate nurturing of economic policies that enrich a few at the expense of both the home country middle class, and the billions around the world who are being driven to terrorism and insurgency by predatory immoral practices pursued by the U.S. Government in partnership with selected multinational corporations, many of which are fronts for importing impoverished illegal workers to the US, and destructively under-priced Chinese goods to the US marketplace–goods that destroy the local ecnomies.
I will end with a complement to the author: he offers and interesting combination of Chomsky and Sachs, a balance between deep critical commentary and deep scholarship. He speaks truth to power. His work merits our attention.
See also, with reviews:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
