Agency-securities Books

Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., writes a revealing account of U.N. incompetence, corruption and lack of judgement. The U.N. cannot make moral decisions about global actions. Therefore, its enforcement and moral standing is nonexistent. With imposed impartiality, it failed to act in Rwanda and Bosnia and even caused the murder of thousands in Srebrenica. Its member refuse to condemn such human rights abusers as China, Zimbabwe, Syria and Iran - while readily condemning Israel and the U.S. Take this book as a warning toward the implementation of contrivances like the International Criminal Court. Will the Chinese judge on the court vote to release Chinese dissidents? Unlikely that they will tackle thorny and needed issues.

The author, after making an earth-shaking exposure of the corruption and greedy deeds of these evil organization, ends up with a tepid note of hope. It just doesn't make any sense. "Money-for-Food" they called it, when they had been fooling the whole free world (the West) by pocketing millions themselves and their club of world dictators. Is this hope inspiring? Refusing to prevent, or do anything to stop, the killing of hundred of thousands of black Africans in Rwanda, and getting away with it? So many, mind you: so many, many issues that have gone practically unnoticed since the end of WWII that are calling for the close-down of this modern day Babylon.

This book picks the most important scandals around the world and exposes them in an easy to understand language. The facts are naked, you put the adjectives. Do we need any more evidence to call this gang a state-sponsored mafia? Will Amazon let me publish this review in my second try? How can Iran be one of the countries to tell us what human rights should be?

A must read to know what we are contributing to with our money.

In the introduction, the author shows that at least once in its existence the United Nations served the purpose it was created for. That was in 1990 when the Security Council took a stand against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Unfortunately, in every other instance it has failed, mostly spectacularly and often with tragic consequences. There were for example the peacekeeping disasters of Somalia 1993, Rwanda 1994, Srebrenica (Bosnia) 1995, Kosovo and Congo/Zaire. The last two crises flowed from the Bosnia and Rwanda disasters respectively. The refusal to confront evil is the major flaw of the UN. This refusal eventually morphed into collusion with evil, as the Oil For Food scandal demonstrates.

In chapter 2: Failure Foreshadowed, Gold discusses the birth of Israel in 1948 when there were no UN forces to withstand the Arab aggression. Likewise during The Kashmir War of the same year between India and Pakistan. Already the organization was betraying the vision of its founders by not acting against the aggressor. And from there it went downhill: Tibet followed in 1950, India annexed Goa in 1962 and many similar acts followed. Chapter 3: Cold War Freeze, looks at the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The next chapter deals with the Six Day War of 1967 and Resolution 242. The UN remained passive and actually enabled the outbreak of war.

During the Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980, the UN again refused to condemn the aggressor and it did nothing about Saddam's 1987 chemical attacks on the Kurds. After the Gulf War, it again ignored genocide, this time against the Shia Muslims of Iraq. In chapter 6: Impartial To Genocide, the disturbing and heartbreaking events of the Rwandan genocide are recalled. General Romeo Dallaire warned the Dept of Peacekeeping Operations - then under Kofi Annan - of the impending horror, but the warning was ignored. In some instances, UN forces colluded with the mass murderers. The UN's inaction ultimately led to a regional war in Central Africa.

The next chapter deals with the tragedy of Srebrenica and the other supposed "safe havens" in Bosnia and shows the duplicity of the UN and certain European governments. Chapter 8 discusses the international criminal court, a highly politicised concept from the beginning, and one that cannot be expected to be objective. Chapter 9 provides proof of how the UN backs terrorists, with particular reference to the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the many instances of collusion between it and the UN's UNIFIL force.

The author concludes that the major cause of these failures is the international body's moral equivalence. It does not distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil or victim and aggressor. Although he was responsible for the failure in Rwanda, Kofi Annan nevertheless became Secretary-General. The Oil For Food scandal and the underreported child sex abuse scandals have completely undermined the organization's legitimacy. It adopts numerous Anti-Israel resolutions every year but has for years ignored the genocide in Darfur. In fact the perpetrator Sudan was elected to its Human Rights Commission in 2004.

The 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban was an openly Antisemitic hate fest. Unlike the EU or Africa, Israel is isolated in that it does not form part of a larger bloc, and it is always up against the Arabic and Islamic states. Although it has failed utterly to halt aggression and bring about a peaceful world order, the UN is still protected by the ideology of political correctness. Some of its agencies still perform good work, but overall the spiral is further downhill as documented in the Afterword with further revelations on Darfur, sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, oil for food monies that went to terrorists and UN agencies infiltrated by terror groups. An example of the latter is UNRWA and its ties to Hamas.

The Appendix: The Paper Trail, provides evidence on various failures like Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Oil For Food and UNRWA's ties to Hamas, mostly from the United Nations' own documents. There are extensive notes, acknowledgements and an index. The book includes maps of the Kashmir Dispute, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six-Day war, Rwanda, and its Neighbours, the Bosnian Conflict and Lebanon and Israel. There are also 17 black and white photographs of personalities and tragic evidence of the UN's failures. In addition to this valuable and informative book, I recommend The UN Gang by Pedro Sanjuan, Global Deception by Joseph Klein, The UN Exposed by Eric Shawn, Inside The Asylum by Jed Babbin and Nations United: How the United Nations Undermines Israel and the West by Alex Grobman.

In 1990-1995, Liberia forced more than 800,000 people into exile. The UN did not exercise its influence and power stopping the injustice. The UN did not bring justice to the Khmer Rouge leaders. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of Cambodians and the UN did not authorize a forceful stop to the murder. The UN was late in response to the 1994 Rwanda War. In 1998, five African countries invaded Congo and by 2001, 2.5 million people were killed and it was not until 2003 that the UN dispatched French forces to establish law and order, a year latter. The UN is letting special interests dictate policy and these economic and social incentives prevent action. The UN policies and actions are seemingly covert; the UN does not want an informed public. The UN is dysfunctional and this ineptiness increases the chance of crimes against humanity. The UN has no deterent capacity.

The UN is not a legal body operating to some objective legal criteria. The UN can maintain diplomatic neutralism in the face of genocidal murders and this is immoral. The UN is taking the side of evil not to fight against evil. The maximum too resist not evil seems to apply to the powerless because the powerless should not provoke greater anger and bring destruction upon them by acting. "The ability to confront evil means the willingness to act boldly and ruthlessly and without consensus". The UN cannot act without consensus and if it's members can reframe from voting then they in essence have prevented healthy action. The ability or refusal, to recognize evil and boldly confront evil is the UN's salient flaw.

The UN has had an unusual amount of authority within the Middle East. The UN affirms the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation. The UN has not deterred the terrorist threat in the Middle East nor has the UN, the supposed protector of international peace and security and improved peace in the world. Instead the UN has gerrymandered itself to many totalitarian regimes giving them voice in shaping world affairs. The UN ideology is weak; the UN remains silent on the peoples right too a representative government; the UN ideology has caved from a position of morality too one of relative morality.

The UN did not create Israel. The UN did not owe its existence to a UN parition plan or UN resolution. The Arab leaque refused to accept the Jewish state.

The Arabs did not disguise their aggression towards Israel and made the following statement "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and crusades." The Arabs represented a group of states against Israel. The UN declared for the first time they would react too the threat with armed intervention. The UN did not react and the failure to act would result in serious injury to the prestige of the UN. The UN called for an Arab cease fire even as the old city of David was falling; 57 synaguoges and academies were destroyed. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin took Kastel allowing 131 trucks carrying 500 tons of food passage into Jerusalem saving a population of 160,000 where 100,000 were at risk.

In 1967, Syrian pressed their claims to the Sea of Galilee, Israel's only source of fresh water, which the armistice had established was entirely within the territory of Israel. In Syria had a new defense treaty with Egypt and April of 1967, Syria escalated shelling of villages in northern Israel. The Israeli's responded to the unusually heavy Syrian artillery barrages by launching fighter aircraft and shot down six Syrian Sovet Mig fighters. Syrian infiltrations increased. IDF, General Yitzhak Rabin warned Syrians that continue provocations would lead to a firm Israeli response that would endanger the Syrian regime. Israel was deterring Syria from exploiting their topographical advantage on the Golan Heights to shell Israeli civilians. The Soviet Union exploited the situation to spread rumors about Israel's plans of expansion inflaming the Arab world. The Soviets warned Egypt that Israel was planning a major offensive against its Syrian military partner. Israel vociferously denied the charge. The UN did nothing to stop the escalation and confrontation crisis. The Egyptians prepared for war. May 18, 1967 President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt massed 80,000 soldiers and 550 tanks on Israel's southern border. Egypt was conveying aggressive intent and commanding the UN Emergency Force to withdraw its peacekeepers from along the border between Israel's Negev Desert and Egyptian Sinai. Egypt artillery gun overlooked the Straits of Tiran, a vital lane Israel depended on for access to the Red Sea and ultimately the Indian ocean. U Thant ordered the UNEF withdrawal and war emanating in the region. U Thant reported to the security council, "Relations between peoples on opposite sides of the line are such that if the United Nations buffer should be removed serious fighting would, quite likely, soon be resumed" Nasser announced he was closing the Straits of Tiran, thereby enacting a blockade against Israel shipping. It was an act of war. Nasser was a pan-Arab advocate intervening in the politics of Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen, where he dispatched a huge expeditionary army in 1962. In 1964, Nasser was known as the "Hero of the Soviet Union" and Soviet admirals were constantly visiting Egypt seeking naval and air bases to counter the US sixth fleet. The UN did not convene to discuss the Egypt-Syria crisis. The Soviet representative said, "The Soviet delegation deems it necessary to stress that it does not see sufficient grounds for hasty convening of the Security Council and for the artificially dramatic climate fostered by the representatives of some Western powers". It is obvious the Soviets wanted Egypt to act out and continue in his confrontational course. Superpowers can not go to war because of mutual assured destruction through the escalating possibility of nuclear weapons; however, superpowers manipulated local governments to engage in confrontations in localized theatres and establish dominance indirectly. Jordon's King Hussein placed his armed forces under Egypt. Two Egyptian commando battalions joined nine Jordanian brigades that were poised to strike Israel from the Jordanian-controlled west bank and 1/3 of the Iraqi army traversed Jordanian territory and was positioned to cross the Jordan River. The battle was intended to destroy Israel and they knew Israel could not absorb the first blow. June 5, two hundred Israeli aircraft destroy Egyptian air force on the ground. More than a 1,000 Israeli's were injuried during the Jordian assault, Israel held its fire until Jordanian troops crossed into Jerusalem. Syria, sent bomber to attack Israel's oil refineries in Haifa Bay and in response Israel destroyed 2/3 of the Syrian air force. Finally, Iraqi bombers attack Israel and prompted an Israel counterstrike. June 10, 1967, Israel had captured the Gaza strip and the Sinai Pennisula, destroying the Egyptian military that had threatened a mass invasion and Israeli forces had captured the West bank and dismantled Jordanian military. They had recovered the old city of Jerusalem. And finally Israel had taken the Golan Heights from Syria. The UN involvement in the conflict had been a dismal failure. The Israeli army had defeated Soviet arms on the battlefield. It was not up to America diplomacy to decisively beat back Soviet initiative at the UN.

The tower of Babel was a futile attempt to unify all people subject by one government. The massive pyramid of money, technology, lust, and greed compelled the people to build upward. Time was their enemy because resources were not unlimited. It was only a matter of time before the tower had too be abandoned as a futile effort. The UN does not have the capability too maintain or create World peace.

God punished the people for their vanity. The people of the tower of Babel fell into confusion and their languages were changed. Individual tribes and small communities emerged with each tribe establishing customary laws and cultures. The idea of one single unifying power was destroyed. The UN will also fall upside and great will be its fall. Hopefully the "deep rooted" ideology of isolationism will compel the US too abandon the United Nations and remove its entanglement in the affairs of other nations. Peace will prevail as nations stop entangling themselves into the economic, social, and moral administration and politics of other countries.

Dore Gold has boldly stated what many people have quietly discussed for years. Tower of Babble is impossible to put down and will be impossible to forget. Most frightening is coming to the realization that we are all pawns in political games of interest and that human lives are truly worth very little to the UN.
I will never be able to view conflicts in the world without wondering what covert deals are influencing its course and how many thousands upon thousands of lives are lost as a result of the UN's "neutral stance."
Dore Gold demonstrates so clearly that the UN has been repeatedly negligent at best and destructive at its worst. The UN will never be able to live up to its founding platform after WWII to never again allow for the mass destruction of people and its time we stopped believing in them at all.

Okay, I have read better books but I believe the author's role in the Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo's dispicable crimes in the murders of three innocent young ladies including Karla's sister is worth reading in the first place if you followed the crimes. Now, Karla is a free woman. Paul will be eligible for parole in 2020 according to the book. I understand profiling is not an exact science. The author writes about the miss in the Hindu Mass HOmicide case where nine innocent monks including a nun were killed execution style for literally peanuts of their wealth. They would have probably given them everything they asked for if they were given the opportunity. The author does lose me with the David Koresh and the Waco situation. I don't believe he firmly explained how dangerous Koresh was specifically. As a reader, we know he followed in the footsteps of another monster, Jim Jones, but the author never clarifies the process of Koresh's madness from leader to dictator in his small congregation. The book is really for crime enthusiasts like myself who enjoys reading about crime and what makes people tick. He is accurate in his depiction of Paul and Karla's crimes against young virginal women including Karla's sister, Tammy Lynn. She was a Christmas Present for Paul from his beloved fiance, Karla. Their relationship was twisted and Karla knew of Paul's crime spree as the Scarborough Rapist but supported it as a game. It still angers me that Karla was released and that Paul may have a chance at parole. Write the Canadian parole boards to stop this from happening. As for Karla, she's the most hated woman in Canada. He also writes in detail about Arthur Shawcross's crimes as a serial killer. There is the European serial killer, Jack Untweger, but he doesn't go into detail about his crimes. He is not as clear as he is about Shawcross' crimes.

I have a fairly large section in my home library on true crime, which has always interested me. I enjoy the writings of John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood, and so, since this book's cover talked about McCrary's working relationship with Douglas, I picked it up at the library.

The writing is fine, but the problem I found is this: McCrary makes it sound as though he is called in or sent to a crime scene, where he expertly profiles the perpetrator. The problem is that he presents a profile, and then is suddenly called to another case, and then something along the lines of "two or three months later, someone else solved the case." In other words, it doesn't sound as though he ever solves anything, or sticks around a crime scene to see if his guesses pan out.

Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I'd really have liked to see McCrary head up an investigation and work it through to the end. Seems to me that both Douglas and Hazelwood did that, and, knowing that, Douglas is prominently mentioned on the book's cover to get people to buy the book. I'm glad I picked it up at the library; while reasonably interesting, it's not going to end up at my library at home.

I could not put this book down and have recommended it to so many people! You start to appreciate the work of a profiler and how important it is in an investigation. Gregg McCrary did such an awesome job in keeping you on the edge of your seat.

You can learn more in a one hour Discovery Channel special than you will in this book. The writing style is simplistic and tediously "Dragnet cute" which doesn't help. What the book needs is a real writer and someone to help organize the material better. Oh, yes, and an editor to cut out the many self-congratulatory asides that further weaken the project.

I've read just about everything by John Douglas and other books on profiling, and am a bit of a Court TV junkie. This book provides new information and insights into criminal profiling and certain cases than previously available, and for that reason, I'd recommend it for a true crime fan. It provides new information on the Paul Bernardo / Karla Homolka husband and wife serial rape "team", the Buddhist Temple Massacre near Phoenix, and the Waco tragedy. The fact that McCary presents fairly convincing evidence that Karla Homolka was hardly the "battered wife" she's usually presented to be in this highly documented case was the most startling to me.

The problem is the writing is tedious to read at several points, and the chapter on the Waco stand-off seems to go on forever. The book could have used some more work by the editor, as some paragraphs don't really fit together and some of the narrative goes along in a herky jerky fashion. For this reason, I would not recommend this book for someone with just a passing interest in the subject.

Another book given to me by a bibliophile friend, John H. Richardson's
"My Father the Spy" proved to be an interesting read. In addition to learning what it is like to be born and raised in the family of a key Central Intelligence Agency operative, the reader gets an inside view of the workings of our secret intelligence gathering agency during critical times of the post-World War II era.

The author's father, the senior John H. "Jocko" Richardson, entered the United States Army during WWII and found himself assigned to a unit of the Central Intelligence Corps, the CIC, hunting down enemy spies and saboteurs in Italy and, when the war ended, pursuing former Nazis in Vienna. It seemed only natural that with his discharge from the army, he became a founding member of the newly formed intelligence wing of the U. S. government, the CIA.

Jocko's work with the CIA took him to Greece, the Philippines, and then to Vietnam, where he became chief of the Saigon station in June, 1962. There he became involved in the machinations leading to the overthrow of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem. He had dealings with CIA director John McCone and the young New York Times reporter, David Halberstam, and became a controversial figure when Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, the infamous Madame Nhu, persecuted the Buddhist leaders who were protesting the state of affairs in Vietnam.

In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy appointed Henry Cabot Lodge to take over the Saigon embassy. Richardson was soon at odds with Lodge, and in October 1963, Jocko was recalled to Washington, where he was named Director of Training for the CIA, and though he tried to enjoy the suburban life of a nine-to-five job in Virginia, Richardson longed for another overseas assignment, and he was at last given his final posting as station chief in South Korea. Finally, in 1973, after more than thirty years as a spy, Jocko Richardson retired to a remote Mexican town, where he spent the remaining years of his life in a kind of self-imposed exile in declining health and spirit.

The meshing of the author's troublesome youth with the story of his father, the spy, seemed forced and sometimes impeded the narrative flow, and the scenes of the senior Richardson's death were tiresomely drawn out, but, all in all, the book proved to be a worthwhile read.

My husband and I were good friends and neighbors of John and Eleanore Richardson during their years in Mexico. We knew them well, but not nearly as well as we did after reading their son's My Father, The Spy, which is an excellent book. John never betrayed his oath of secrecy, so that, though he was a marvelous conversationalist, widely read and with a large range of interests, one received only the barest outline of the lives these two and their family had lived in the circles of power and often, of international intrigue. The book's prose has both grace and balance. John Richardson, Jr. constructed the chapters so that My Father, the Spy reads very much like a novel, and a really gripping one at that. Beyond the personal element, we valued the fineness of the book, its careful research, its compelling explanation of historically-known episodes and its ability to interweave the personal with the broader historical picture.

After reading this book I felt like I really saw into the life of this family. How interesting is it to live in North Korea duriing your teen years when your Dad is a spy? John Richardson is honest about his teen selfishness, and also honest about his family struggles. Its a human tale. Although I was a little bored at times, overall I liked it enough to pass the book along.

I found My Father the Spy to be an intriguing,finely written memoir exploring the dynamics of family, country and the internal workings of the CIA. The author takes the reader from World War II, through the turbulent Vietnam era to Watergate and beyond. He explains the burst of behavior against the sadness of his father and his generation during the 60's and 70's and raises questions about current affairs.It's written in an honest and sensitive way, drawing the reader into personal,realistic details of family life.
Richard has made this book difficult to put down, combining mystery and realism so well.

I found myself thinking about this book long after I read the last page and highly recommend it to readers of all ages.

5 stars!

Barbara G. DeCesare, Warwick, RI

When John Richardson's father died, he decided to investigate the elder Richardson's mysterious career in government, resulting in this partially interesting family memoir. The unassuming and bookish father was actually an old-school cold warrior, with many years at fairly high levels in the CIA spy organization. This includes playing a big part in the early years of America's involvement in Vietnam, plus working in several other countries where the CIA was obsessed with knocking off the communists. For about the first two-thirds of this memoir, we get an enjoyable look at the history and politics surrounding the elder Richardson's responsibilities in the CIA, as we learn along with Richardson Jr. how nail-biting his dad's life really was. The general family biography is also pretty interesting, as we learn about young Richardson and his sister growing up as expatriate American kids in several different foreign nations.

Unfortunately, this book collapses in the final third, as we reach dad's retirement from the stressful spy life and the family's return to America. Here the younger Richardson moves inexorably into unfulfilling ruminations of his own problems during his teen and college years, apparently trying to atone for his substance abuse and other embarrassing peccadilloes. But he writes as if he was the only young person who ever felt aimless and got into trouble, and as if his family's dysfunctions were unique just because they were more worldly than most. Well none of this is unique, or instructive for the reader. Here Richardson Jr. gets ridiculously self-indulgent, and this family melodrama has nearly nothing to do with his father's intriguing career as a spy, which is what made the first parts of the book pretty interesting. Then the book ends with excessively tortuous coverage of the father's slow and agonizing death from cancer, and this is disrespectful both to Richardson Sr. and to the reader. Hence, Richardson Jr.'s apparent attempt to mix political history, family memoir, and self-examination is unsuccessful. [~doomsdayer520~]

I read this book years ago and it opened my eyes about the realities of sending money and food aid and aid workers to countries in crisis. Not to say that we shouldn't but frankly many many times it isn't foreign aid that these countries really need it is government that isn't corrupt or even military action that will stop the immediate killing as in Rawanda. The author knows his stuff and the book is a thoughtful analysis of what works and what doesn't and what CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS even though the donors want to feel good by giving aid. All of these aid programs should be renewed or not renewed on a basis of 'change for the better'. But alas we just keep sending more money & aid and the corrupt people continue to benifit the most. And in the case of Rawanda, by mandating help without prejudice to either side we caused the killers to get aid so they could survive & kill more. A MUST read for proponents of foreign aid. FIRST DO NO HARM.
barb

The author does point out many of the problems with humanitarian non-governmental organizations. They do plenty of self-promotion. They make deals with a variety of thugs just to be permitted to operate in some regions. In other cases, they make deals with various nations, adopting their political causes. Worst of all, they can be misused by those with truly genocidal plans: they can be assigned to give food and lodging to intended victims, drawing them into camps. When armies show up to murder the victims, the humanitarians obviously get out of the way. But just what service does all this provide?

While I found myself disagreeing with the author on plenty of occasions, I think he's written a good book. He's clearly raised all the main issues with humanitarian aid. These include questions of whether whether neutrality, impartiality, outright support for victims, or none of the above is the most effective way to help people.

In the case of a genuine human rights organization, there's no doubt what the goal is. The charters of such organizations are clear: they never are to support outright opponents of human rights politically. Those charters are often violated, but at least we all know what they are supposed to do. But in the case of humanitarian organizations, there are no such goals. The idea is to provide day-to-day help to the needy, and being misused by people who intend to murder the needy may not even violate their charters.

In any case, Rieff shows how humanitarian efforts failed in a most disheartening way in Bosnia and Rwanda. And perhaps he's at his best when he explains how useless the United Nations has been in protecting anyone from aggressors. He quotes one person as explaining that had the UN existed in the 1930s, all of Europe would now be speaking German.

Rieff is pessimistic about the effectiveness of humanitarian aid in many areas. And I have to agree with him about this. Perhaps the worst aspect of it is that such failures, by giving humanitarianism a bad name, will encourage many people who truly want to help others to do something else instead.

For me, disenchantment came in the form of Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General for the United Nations. When I was a child, on Halloween, I walked around with my happy little UNICEF box collecting money instead of candy, and through school I learned that the UN was this wonderful organisation that had the intention of creating a perfect utopia of a world in which there was peace and no famine. This, of course, was before Kosovo and Annan's Oil For Food scandal. True, Kosovo was but a blurred memory from middle school, but I was wide awake for the Oil For Food fiasco. The more I read about the United Nations in high school and college, the more I came to abhor the institution.

I'm no stranger to charity and humanitarianism -- I'm spending my summer in Ghana with an aid organisation, will be doing two years in the Peace Corps after getting my Nurse Practitioner license, and after that plan to work for Médecins Sans Frontières as a full-time job. Africa is my passion, one could say, and I'd like nothing more than to be there all the time.

That said, humanitarianism has become bogged down in the mire of politics and utopianism. In A Bed for the Night, author David Rieff not only outlines the beginnings of modern humanitarianism in Biafra in the late 1960s, but also highlights the key flaws in specific cases of humanitarianism in the last decade such as Bosnia and Rwanda. No Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is left untouched -- he explains the failings of every NGO from the umbrella of the UN to the seemingly infallible Red Cross to Oxfam. Both sides of the issue are covered through interviews with such varied people as Rony Brauman of Médecins Sans Frontières and Jean-François Vidal of Action Contre la Faim. His arguments are absolutely supported in every way; he leaves no stone left unturned, and every reference from his ten years of research in preparation for writing the book are listed in a bibliography for fact checking. Also added after the first publish date is an afterward on Iraq which I found very interesting because it was written before Saddam Hussein was captured -- Rieff even says things like "two weeks after the war was finished" when we all know now, three years later, that Iraq is nowhere near being finished.

Basically though, the book is about how NGOs have made themselves bitches to world governments, something which, you know, basically defeats the point of the 'N' in the front of the acronym. Through this inability to stand up for themselves and be independent organisations, they've lost the neutrality that once made it easy for them to go into war zones and help those who needed to be helped.

This book most definitely is for a limited audience. It reads much like a doctoral thesis, which is something that I love, but most people would probably tire of the vocabulary or perhaps even not know what words mean. I read some passages to my younger sister, a junior in high school with all As, and she had no idea what I was even saying a good chunk of the time. For one to understand this book, one must have experience in reading research papers and theses, I would say. It has a lot of information to delve through and one has to be able to absorb the information from it as if he or she were doing research for his or her own project. Knowledge of history is also very important, though Rieff does generally explain the history behind each humanitarian tragedy. Because I'm familiar with most of the organisations in the book, I'm not completely sure if it would be important to know them beforehand, though I did find it helpful, because Rieff does include a handy little reference in the back of all of the organisations mentioned.

If you have some sort of undying affection for the UN, I'd recommend you stay as far away from this book as possible, honestly. Because of my nearly psychotic hate of the UN, I enjoyed every poke and prod at both the organisation and Kofi Annan. On the other hand, if you're a big fan of Médecins Sans Frontières, dive right on in -- Rieff basically states that it's the only aid organisation that's worth a damn in this day and age. Additionally, if you're one of the people who thinks that humanitarianism is the panacea for all the world's problems, the thing that will bring utopia to earth, get away from this book and get the hell away from me.

There are two quotes from this book that I think basically sum it up, the first from Rory Brauman:

'It can not be an accident that the one thing tyrants and aid workers have in common is their liking for being posed next to children.'

And David Rieff on the topics of 'The Responsibility to Protect' and human rights getting mixed into humanitarianism:

'A few dissenting figures, notably in certain French humanitarian circles, have argued that humanitarianism as a vocation needs to separate itself from this project [The Responsibility to Protect], no matter how worthy the larger goals of human rights, conflict resolutions, and the creation of the conditions for peace and development in the poor world may seem to aid workers, and no matter how fervently, as citizens, they hope for the success of such efforts. Where other NGOs, particularly those issuing from the British and American aid traditions, often assume aid groups could play a useful role if only they could develop further their human rights and peace-building "capacities," many of the most influential figures within MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] and like-minded agencies such as ACF [Action Contre la Faim] continue to insist that such projects take humanitarianism far beyond any role it is suited for.'

Basically, for humanitarianism to survive, aid workers have to realise that they can't change the world on a grand scale, they can't bring peace, they can't make utopia -- they need to accept that their aid is on a local scale and that despite the fact that the world isn't going to know each thing they do, it's going to make a diffence in someone's life. There must be a return to neutrality so that the work that needs to be done can be done one person at a time.

A credible analysis of the fig-leaf for endless state inaction that these abused, heroic organizations have become. Credible because the author obviously reached his conclusions with great anguish at the fact. Credible because, Rieff is the same author who wrote the Nov NYT 2003 piece, "Blueprint for a Mess" excoriating the administration for its Iraq policy. This is not a Wilsonian / Wolfowitz interventionist itching to let the ship of state set sail, and because of that, his pained conclusions about the reasons for state inaction/ineffective action in the face of pressing needs to act are credible.

The West/America/Europe in recent decades, primarily through the mechanism of the UN, has made a great show of doing everything possible right up to but excluding actually doing anything. Compassion on the cheap. 'We're doing everything possible, the UN is on the job, and as long as all parties agree and have invited them, will show up and defend only themselves rudely in front of people desperately needing defense. The NGOs are on site. We're handing out the blankets and the coffee and the bandaids to rapist and victim alike, so nothing more can be done, and we can all go back to reading our papers and tsk-tsk-tsking and sipping our Capuccinos, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that can be done, is being done, short of actually doing soemthing.'

Find out why that's a fig leaf on the UN seal, not an olive branch. We are all the problem; we don't have the good sense our daddies taught us about when to and when not to lift a hand. Read this book.

Pulling no punches, Rieff has written a damning insight into the current humanitarian care industry (and it has become an industry) has lost its way in the modern day. While showing great admiration for people who believe they are doing the right thing, Rieff exposes the problems with the current methods and thinking behind humanitarian intervention and aid, especially the loss of neutrality and the growth of advocacy for military intervention.

This is a fascinating book, and one that should be read by those who hold beliefs on either side of the humanitarian intervention debate. While this reader came to this book in the context of studying International Security, including the issue of humanitarian intervention, it would be of interest to anyone who has thought about the continuing humanitarian crises throughout the world and what should be done about them. Occasionally Rieff comes across as hyperbolic, and he almost loses the reader's sympathies, but he has the facts and experiences to back up what he is saying. Covering a breadth of organizations, situations and viewpoints, this is a powerful book that at the very least will make you think next time you hear calls for peacekeepers to intervene or are asked to donate to one of the multitude of relief organizations at work today.

Unfortunately, Bill Gertz is not the household name he deserves to be. In the media it seems, only the propensity to lie and hew to a left-wing line brings widespread fame and fortune. Think Dan Rather, for example.

Instead, a conservative interested in the truth like Bill Gertz has to be content with a much smaller measure of fame - but he is entitled to a full measure of our respect for telling the truths the left-wing media won't allow on their pages or on their airwaves.

Here Gertz tells the story - which any intelligent American concerned with destiny of their nation can sense and see - of unelected bureaucrats who have for all intents and purposes become the government themselves.

For those who didn't pick up the bits and pieces as the stories emerged, Gertz lays them out in detail here.

For example, the absolute travesty of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that irreparably damaged the United States in its efforts to force Iran to end its nuclear weaponry program. The NIE was under the control of Thomas Fingar, a left-wing intelligence analyst at the State Department. Gertz's examination of this tragedy - and that is not too strong a term for it - is very complete and should make your blood boil if you are a real American.

That we had a President and Secretary of State who would permit this to happen and go both uncorrected and unpunished is deplorable.

Worse, President Bush allowed his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to publicly contradict him on a policy issue. While the incident demonstrated the weakness of Bush, it also demonstrated the power of the careerists in our national government.

Name the major issue facing the United States and Gertz can - and does - tell you how left-wingers in the national government, with their own agenda, are making their own policies without regard for genuine national interests.

This is not a cheerful book. It is, in a way, reminiscent of Winston Churchill's attempts to rouse a sleeping England, Europe and United States from their slumber in the 1930s and to confront the dangers facing them.

Published before the recent election, Gertz includes a penetrating analysis of the Democrat Presidential contenders, one of whom obviously won the election.

"Reforming the federal government bureaucracy must be the highest priority of the President of the United States, Gertz opines. The problem is that our next President will not be taking Gertz's advice. Instead he will be listening tothe very people Gertz identifies in this chilling book.

Dark days are ahead for the United States.

Jerry

Not fun to read, but very enlightning. Everyone who cares about where we are and how we got there concerning our security, should read this.

Failure Factory is a book filled with what I would consider factual information. But then there are the interpretations of those facts. In the area of maintaining America's dominance, the author seems to believe that only hard-line approaches can work. The author dismisses other approaches as deliberate undermining of America's power. I am not sure I agree with that. For me to be more comfortable with many of Mr. Gertz's conclusions, I would first like to see some professional reviews coming from all sides of the political spectrum. So far, I have been unable to find any.

this is an outstanding book that should be a must read by all americans, regardless of political posture. Bill Gertz is probably the only political investigative journalist alive today, and he should be read and appreciated for the information he presents to the public.

This should be required reading for all you who voted for Obama. It will help you prepare for what's ahead.

Absolutely fascinating! Mr. Gates is an excellent writer and is able to make complicated information easy to follow. And what an insight he gave to the Presidents he worked for; he didn't have an axe to grind with any of them, even though they represented both political parties.

This is a book I enjoyed so completely that I hated to reach the end of it. It will be on my personal "re-read" list. No wonder Mr. Gates was selected to become Secretary of Defense in our nation's hour of need.

I was hoping for a work of academic skill enhanced by practical experience. What I got was a demonstration of the level of mediocrity common in government service. The author, who rose through CIA ranks to become first head of the analytical directorate (DDI) and then CIA director (and now Secretary of Defense), shows himself as an intellectual lightweight. It turns out that his only qualification for the analyst job initially was washing out as an operations officer.

Excellent account of what really goes on from the inside of the govt. They say that truth is better than fiction. This is true in a big way in this book. You will recall many of the events in not too distant history. They come alive in this book and history makes more sense. Intense reading - be sure to underline the names to keep track of the huge cast of characters. A big Aggie thumb's up for this one!

Rarely do you run across a historical book that is so chocked full of names, dates and acronyms that engages your mind as you push to reader faster. Gates delivers great insight wrapped in words that are illustrative of the push and pull of power players - within and between government bodies - domestic and global. If you are curious about the claims of one party or the other concerning the end of the Cold War, then this book will prove to be enlightening. All contributed to the demise, but perhaps none more than the Soviets themselves. Great read. Engaging. Insightful. Illuminating. Perhaps now more than ever before this a read that helps look at the challenges we, as a global community, face today. Buy it. Read it. Gain perspective.

The CIA is probably the one institution that the US President controls the most; or so this book argues. Robert M. Gates spent over two decades working at the CIA, and is one of the few career officials who came in near the bottom and rose all the way to the top. This book is his memoir, and recollection of how the CIA served 5 consecutive presidents in the Cold War. Starting with Richard Nixon, and ending with the first George Bush, Gates shows how each president used, and sometimes abused, the CIA to further their policies with regard to the USSR and communist parties around the world.

The major points one gets from this book are as follows. First, Carter was no wimp with regard to the USSR. Second, the most dangerous years of the Cold War did not end with Vietnam; they included some years in the 1980's. Third, the CIA consistently disregards the laws of the US. Fourth, the CIA often gets suckered into doing thing at the whim of the president that it later regrets. Last, the first George Bush was probably one of the best diplomats the US has seen in recent times. Over all, this was a very good book and I am glad I read it.

You'll be impressed with the candid and complicated details of the CIA's loss of independence and evolving politization.

Goodman's overall premise -- the politicization of intelligence has crippled the CIA -- is dead-on. Much of this book centers on the two most glaring examples of that thesis, the fall of the USSR and the rush to war in Iraq. Yet Goodman overlooks some of the lower-level organizational problems in the Agency to spotlight the top-tier policy dynamics. The corporateness, risk-aversion and lagging creativity that are evident at all levels affect retention, promotion, operations, analysis and interagency relations. The good officers walk out in frustration for many of the reasons Goodman alludes to, while the remaining automatons and careerists flourish and rise. His account remains politically balanced, as he takes equal shots at both Democrat and Republican administrations. But his personal dislikes of specific individuals from his time in CIA shine through. Goodman's praise of Paul Bremer and Stansfield Turner as "luminaries" leads the reader to question his criteria of solid leadership and sound statecraft. There is also a overarching tone of idealism, if not naivety, in his views of intelligence collection, particularly in HUMINT operations. The editing is a bit rough and cut-and-paste text redundancy detracts from the book. Much of the Iraq material has been thoroughly covered by other authors.

After forty years as a CIA insider, Melvin Goodman has produced a sweeping account of the agency's history and political entanglements that combines the solidity of good research with the readability of lively writing. Goodman's rich historical context and depth of detail, and the new insights he brings to familiar figures (and not-so-familiar characters) add dimension to his narrative. But while it's a fascinating read, it's also a dispiriting one. Goodman contends that, not long after the CIA's beginnings, in the Truman administration, the agency was used, not for objective strategic information, but had already devolved into a policy arm of whatever government was in power. (Need political justification for the invasion of X? Call the CIA.) Goodman goes into detail regarding covert operations during the Cold War, the CIA and the threat of terrorism, and he and also goes into great detail about the Iraq War and the political climate surrounding that. It would be wonderful if the information in the Iraq chapters were available to every American (including--and especially--our political leaders!). Interested in politics, history. and foreign affairs since World War II? Read this book! Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA

Goodman's book offers a valuable angle on how and why the CIA failed to know about Soviet nuclear testing, failed to foresee the collapse of the USSR, and how it regularly buried intel at odds with White House policy (glasnost, Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, the list goes on an on). In all this Goodman conveys much needed background on the miserable CIA failure concerning events leading up to--and including--9/11.

But, apparently, due to its hurried publication, it is annoyingly repetitive, filled with typos, and, overall, very poorly edited. Chapter and section headings have no particular or useful meaning.

That said, Goodman presents the last 40 years of CIA bumbling in the context of the political ideologues, bureaucratic incompetence, and abuse of executive power under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes. He gleefully and repeatedly skewers current Sec. of Defence Robert Gates and his rise as William Casey's Cold War Flunkie, Team-Player, and Yes-Man.

Perhaps because Goodman resigned in the early 1990s, or perhaps because of legalistic or ideological limitations on his part, this book places little emphasis on the increased reliance of U.S. intelligence services upon foreign governments, the outsourcing of intel to Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, to name a few, and even to private firms, each with its own agenda. Providing the basic outlines of this particular trend would be the icing on the cake, but in the intelligence world which Goodman-As-Author inhabits, he is content with something less ambitious. (For more on CIA failures and fiddling, without the office infighting and I-told-you-so's, see Joseph Trento's The Secret History of the CIA and Prelude to Terror: the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network the Compromising of American Intelligence.)

As a 30 year veteran of CIA's clandestine service. I agree with much of what Mel Goodman has to say about the Agency: the intrusion of political bias into the analytical process, the substitution of tactical for the more insightful strategic intelligence, and the loss of objectivity, when the military - a major consumer of the product - also becomes. its principal collector. President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, and his warning bears repeating: Crises make for good business and create high-paying jobs. When CIA's agents discovered that the missile gap was a myth, and later, that the Soviet Union was a knight dying in its armor, a great many defense contractors and their congressman became very nervous. Production lines were threatened; layoffs would surely follow, and pressure was applied to suppress or to ridicule such reporting. When the Director of Central Intelligence. "...serves at the pleasure of the president," his agency becomes particularly vulnerable to such pressures.

Like so many other critiques of CIA, however, Mel Goodman's book fails to identify a major contributor to CIA's erratic performance -- our Casanova-like approach to intelligence collection.. We turn it on when a crisis arises, but shut it down as soon as the crisis is over. With so many unmet societal requirements, why waste money on something no longer needed, particularly when it employs tactics that so blatantly offend core values of a Democratic society?

The antipathy is understandable, but its effects are devastating. Every time we close down coverage of a target, the best & brightest hands melt away. In the five to ten years it takes them to become professionals, they learn the language, get to know the territory, get to know the shakers & movers and learn how to get things done. Just the sort of people, the multinationals and the think tanks are dying for, and they are lured away by big salaries and sign-on bonuses. As James Risen observed in the New York Times, "In the mid-1990s, CIA became like an airline that had lost its senior pilots." But then, when the territory again becomes of interest, we have to start with a new batch of recruits and live with their mistakes as they learn their craft. Rank amateurism and inexperience were major contributors to the Abu Ghraib fiasco.

When Mr. Goodman dismisses CIA's operatives as risk averse, because they are protected by diplomatic immunity, it reveals that most of his experience was on the analytical and not be operational side. He ignores the large body of case officers that are under nonofficial cover, the operatives that were dropped into Afghanistan after 9/11 and well ahead of the military, as well as the technicians, often documented as tourists, that surreptitiously enter denied areas to install video and audio sensors. Three of those were caught in flagrante in Cuba and spent several years in Mr. Castro's prisons.

In summary, Mel Goodman's book very accurately captures the political winds that buffet America's intelligence efforts, and he is spot-on accurate in decrying the layers of unnecessary bureaucracy added by the creation of the Director of National Intelligence. But CIA is a vast and complex tapestry, and Mr. Goodman covers only a part of the territory.

I have just finished reading Ghost Plane -- and I have just one problem with it's contents. Grey makes numerous references to the capture, detention, and confessions of the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and yet Grey fails to mention Khalid's reported death on September 16th 2002 in Pakistan at the hands of Pakistani security forces, months before he was officially captured by the FBI and Pakistani joint operation in March 2003.

It would seem most unfortunate to be killed and then resurrected only to have the misfortune to be captured. It would seem possible, that the FBI and CIA needed to have a high value prisoner -- who would sing like a canary after a few session on the water-board, and implicate many other detained suspects in complicity in his crimes. We will never know, but the chances are that whomever is being duffed up in the name of American liberty down in Cuba is nothing more than a stooge, who will say anything to spot the beatings and who also (quite conveniently) confessed to killing Daniel Pearle, allowing the actual murder and Pakistani ISI agent - Omar Saeed - to be freed soon enough. It is also worth mentioning, that Omar Saeed is the man who wired Mohammed Atta the $100k at the bequest of the head of Pakistani's ISI, not Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as many believe.

More on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed;

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=essayksmcapture

If the US wants to torture prisoners they should force them to read this poorly written book. Very unimpressive writing that makes the book hard to follow.

A fabulous job of integrating detail with narrative into a web of our secret and not too righteous world of torture, kidnapping and disregard for human rights.
Grey has made his case of detailing the flights, passengers, destinations, and outcomes of the "rendition" and extraordinary rendition by our own government. And how the details of delusion of the public were worked out by Gonzalez et al.
This book is well worth reading if you have an interest in how a government can go overboard in trashing human rights--and still get poor results (from torture).
What looks like a formidable read turns out to be riveting and is truly a worhtwhile addition to the support of a better, more open government that is above torture.

Grey's book is thoroughly researched and he documents very well the careless "trail" that the CIA left behind.

The first half of the book can be a bit difficult to follow at times, as they are "case-studies" on individual prisoners. I found it a bit challenging to keep all the key players in context.

However, with that said, Grey includes all the detail to set the stage for proving that these renditions had taken place, and that the Executive Branch had knowingly "out-sourced" enemy combatants to organizations that carried-out the tortures, on behalf of the US.

Three of the key points that I took away from this book were: a sense of disappointment and disgust with the US approach. Sen. John McCain, who himself was tortured as a POW (Read his book "Faith of Our Fathers"), vehemently opposes torture. He continues to state that the biggest thing that kept him and his fellow POWs steadfast, was that they stalwartly believed that their government was "above" this type of treatment, and humanity and justice by the US makes them different than their captors.

The second point is that torture is counter-productive to achieving peace and diplomacy. Grey does a nice job of laying-out how these actions only serve to fuel and further incite the animosity that hostile organizations feel for the US.

The final point, that defense cuts and disregard for the value of human intelligence, by past presidential administrations, really fostered the environment for the Bush aministration to play "catch-up"...although it doesn't exonerate the Administration from the actions.

I'll leave the rest to you to uncover how Bush, Condi Rice, the CIA, looked the other way as this all went down...

Stephen Grey, a former editor of the Sunday Times’ Insight investigation team, broke many of the news stories about the CIA’s programme of secret renditions. In this extremely useful book, he gives us the fullest account yet of this programme. He exposes the CIA’s covert aircraft fleet, Aero Contractors, and also describes how CIA planes operated illegally in Venezuela to support the attempted coup against President Chavez in 2002.

The CIA runs a system of clandestine prisons holding thousands of kidnapped prisoners, taken from Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Germany, Italy, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Zambia, Gambia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia to be tortured in Afghanistan, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Syria, Egypt and Morocco. Grey writes, “the foreign torture cells of Cairo and Damascus and the US jails at Guantanamo and Bagram were part of one interconnected gulag in which prisoners were swapped both between countries but also between the CIA and the US military.”

Grey asked Edward Walker, US Ambassador to Egypt, “When Condoleezza Rice and the president now stand in front of people and say we don’t send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?” Walker replied, “No, they’re not telling the truth.” A CIA official said, “nothing was done without approval from the White House – from Condoleezza Rice herself.”

The Bush and Blair governments talk democracy but support dictatorship. For example, in 2002, the State Department said Uzbekistan ‘routinely’ tortured prisoners, then gave it an extra $180 million aid. Grey points out that the Blair government connived in the renditions and in the use of torture, by using the ‘information’ gained from torturing prisoners. Nor has the Blair government defended British citizens from CIA rendition.

Grey also notes that the illegal war on Iraq is a counter-productive diversion from the struggle against Al-Qaeda. As Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee said in April 2005, “We judge that the conflict in Iraq has exacerbated the threat from international terrorism and will continue to have an impact in the long term. It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.” The JIC said that the war ‘provided an additional motivation for attacks’ on Britain and was ‘increasing Al Qaeda’s potential’.

Similarly, the US government’s appalling treatment of prisoners has worsened the threat from Al-Qaeda. Grey concludes, “America’s programme of extraordinary rendition and its harsh treatment of prisoners have not, when considered strategically, been successful weapons against terrorism.”

I am reading this book, which was hailed by everybody who is anybody, and am trying to figure out whether it is written to elucidate or to obfuscate things.
Yes, the book is a catalog of strategic and tactical failures of CIA. May be so. But the unintended (or, worse, intended) consequence is that it excuses our "deciders" for their failures. My personal feeling (and I admit it is cynical) is that one academic (the author of the book -Dr. Zegart) is exonerating another - Dr. Rice, who was the National Security advisor to President Bush during his first 233 days in the office.
Despite the book's catalog of CIA's inadequacies and "missed opportunities", it seems to me the CIA actually delivered a rather striking warning by way of a report on 8/6/2001 to President Bush in Texas under the rubric "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In the United States".
This CIA Report, which was part of President Bush's Daily Brief, referred to the World Trade Center, to the FBI conducting 70 filed investigations of Al Qaeda cells within the US and "pattern of suspicious activity in the US consistent with preparation for hijackings"
Dr. Zegart, like Dr. Rice seems to be affronted by a presumption of a threat so vaguely worded and improperly presented. The centerpiece of the book is actually a critique of this CIA report and its multiple "sins of omissions" (page 109). Likewise Dr. Rice, seemed affronted by a member of 9/11 Commission who questioned her why so little attention was paid to CIA briefing paper. Dr. Rice's answer was "That was not a warning" because " it was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack."
Behind the dialect of government acronym and techno-babble of the book, pages devoted to how outmoded FBI computers couldn't talk to CIA computers and "omissions" of CIA briefs and inadequacies in the "structure" of country's intelligence are buried very specific and very human causes and effects of failings of our very human leaders.

Amy Zegart's first book, Flawed by Design, explained why the intelligence community was incapable of doing its job during the Cold War. Spying Blind shows how it was even less capable of dealing with the post-Cold-War world. No conspiracy theory is needed to explain why the FBI and the CIA, which between them had all of the pieces of the 9/11 puzzle in their hands by the summer of 2001, filed to put the puzzle together until the planes hit the World Trade Center: all you need to know is the bureaucratic incentives that put a priority on "need-to-know" over "need-to-share." But the important message isn't about the past but about the future. The agencies that failed to find the 9/11 plot are ready to fail again tomorrow. Only if the new President and the Congress are willing to take on a massive political-bureaucratic battle is there any prospect of reform.

There have been a number of 9/11 postmortems, many focused on the catastrophic intelligence failure it represented. Nothing written to date by journalists or retired intelligence personnel rises to the level of analytical precision exhibited by Professor Zegart. The fundamental problem was information sharing - as the world knows (or should know) from the 9/11 Commission Report and subsequent disclosures by the government, various agencies of the US intelligence community possessed useful information on key individuals associated with al-Qaeda's September 11 plot, and could have apprehended two or three of them well before 9/11, which would probably have caused the entire plot to unravel. The barriers to information sharing and collaboration across agency boundaries were well known long before 9/11, highlighted in the recommendations of a depressing number of high-level intelligence reform commissions during the 1990s which all said, essentially, the same thing. Yet the institutional culture of the intelligence agencies (CIA in particular) and the FBI proved impervious to reform. Even now, approaching seven years after the disaster of 9/11, a truly collaborative approach to counterterrorism is still in its infancy. Among the many gems to be found in her exhaustive deconstruction of the pre-9/11 intelligence problem, Prof. Zebart thoroughly explodes the notion that the recently-declassified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001 was a "smoking gun" that should have alerted the President and Condoleezza Rice that a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent. In actuality it was anything but a smoking gun, with little to say of any value or relevance to policymakers